by Tim Lebbon
I glance at Olivia and she’s smiling. It’s tentative, as if she’s unsure whether I can accept anyone feeling or appearing happy around me. My recounting of the story has only just begun, but everyone already knows something of how it ends.
“I’d like that.”
She nods, relieved, and heads out to the balcony. I feel a flush of disappointment.
“Oh. I thought you meant…”
A craft rises from out of sight below. It’s a simple platform with rails, and whatever power source drives it is hidden beneath swept metal skirting. Olivia glances back, one eyebrow raised, and then steps up onto the balcony wall. One more step and she is on board, waiting for me. The craft makes very little noise. It reminds me of the constant, almost unnoticeable background hum of Cradle.
Once I’m with her, Olivia performs several subtle gestures with her left hand and the platform drops away, sweeping out from the building and down towards the plain. There is no breeze, very little sound, and hardly any sense of movement. Even so, she remains silent. She knows how much I want to take this in, and her consideration surprises me as much as ever. If she truly sees me as a mass murderer, she is very good at hiding her thoughts.
The tower recedes behind us, seemingly growing higher as we drop away. I keep focussed on my rooms, my balcony, but soon it is lost from view. The structure is far wider and taller than I thought, mostly regular in shape apart from several sweeping protuberances around the tower’s head, far higher than my own rooms. They remind me of wings, and that reminds me of Cradle and what happened, and I turn away and look down. We are already close to the ground, and this low there are many other crafts drifting to and fro. There don’t seem to be any defined routes, yet every aircraft shifts in a graceful dance, never drawing too close to those around them.
“There’s a lovely path along the river,” Olivia says. “The bluebells will be out now.”
“Sounds good.”
She makes another gesture and the craft veers to the left, dropping down and landing softly at the edge of a field of bright yellow blooms. Several creatures scamper away, hiding in the undergrowth and watching us with glittering, intelligent eyes. I think perhaps they are rabbits.
“We’ll have company, I’m afraid,” Olivia says. Two small objects rise from the surface of the craft, coalescing into shiny globes that draw close to us, so close that I can see my own distorted reflection in them both. I nod. I understand without her having to tell me that these are some sort of robot guards. If I run, I won’t get far.
They must know by now that the last thing I want to do is run.
We step down from the platform onto the ground, and I gasp. This is it, I think. I really am standing on the ground. I slip off my sandals and clench my toes in the grass.
“I’ll arrange for some food to be brought out to us,” she says. “Shall we walk a little? You’ll have to go back to your rooms later, but we have a while.”
“And meantime I continue my story, right?”
“I’m trying to help,” she says.
I nod and smile. I know she is, and it’s unfair of me to suggest otherwise. I can’t blame them for thinking of me as a monster.
Telling my story is the only way to defend myself. There are decisions, sacrifices, that systems and computers––even an AI like Cradle––can never truly understand.
It’s all about being human.
I stare at Olivia, and not for the first time I wonder if she is.
* * *
I was trapped in the cannon array. Weapon systems were still online, but I was completely isolated. No contact with Cradle, no channels open to other arrays, or the Bridge, or anywhere else. Just me and the weapon screens, the cannon controls, and the weapon’s reactor status indicators.
There was also the view outside, with those things drifting with us, passing overhead, and buzzing Cradle.
They were massive. They must have been, to be visible from so far away. The wings captured starlight and twisted, curled, flexed. Their bodies were slender and difficult to discern, one moment appearing solid, the next diaphanous. Sometimes the five shapes were similar, and then the next moment they were individual and unique, examples of something I had yet to fully understand. Animals? Gas? Illusions? Cradle had said it didn’t know, and now it was down to me to decide. I’d never been so alone.
I locked the cannon onto one of the objects and hovered my hand over the activation screen.
Another shape peeled off to the south and closed in quickly, swooping down and out of sight around Cradle’s curving hull.
“Hello?” I said, touching the all-channels screen. “Anyone out there? Can anyone hear me?” I switched channels, sub-vocalised a code, and tried again. “Geena? Can you hear me?” She would be down in Cradle’s belly, several kilometres away where countless people slept time away in cryo-tubes. She kept them well. None of them would ever know her––we would all die of old age before we even reached our destination––but she cared for them nonetheless. They were humanity’s future.
“Geena?” I shouted, knowing it would do no good. I tried the cannon array access controls again. Then one more attempt to communicate with Cradle.
It should hear me!
“Cradle? Cradle!”
Maybe it’s ignoring me.
It should have worked. When all hard systems were down, we were all fitted with smart pods deep inside our left ears through which we could access the Cradle AI at any time, and from any place.
Except now.
I felt abandoned, and imagined every other crewmember struggling with the same problem. Desperate to not be alone anymore, while those things––
Two swept in close together, almost dancing with each other as they drifted in from the north. One peeled off and disappeared from my sight, curving quickly around the ship’s hull. The other slowed to a virtual halt.
It might have been in touching distance, or ten kilometres away. I stared, hand still hovering over the cannon activator. I locked on. I was shaking. The scanner glowed green and awaited my one, final touch.
Watching it, I also felt the thing watching me.
“Hello?” I asked. No one, nothing answered. Each of us was now alone, vulnerable, and ever since birth we had all been part of a team, connected permanently to Cradle and each other via the smart pods. We were a unit that worked together, but no longer. The isolation was crippling.
They must have done this on purpose.
It’s an attack, I thought. Maybe they’ve killed everyone else on the ship and that’s why I can’t hear or communicate with anyone. Maybe they’ve murdered Cradle.
Almost without thinking, almost of its own accord, my hand lowered and stroked across the screen.
My senses were flooded with light as the whole array shuddered around me. A loud thump punched at my ears and stole my breath. The shaking soon settled, but my vision took longer, swimming with blooming palettes of red and orange like exploding suns. I blinked and pressed my hands to my eyes. When I took them away, everything had changed.
Silence hung heavier over the interior of my cannon array. I felt watched, the centre of attention, no longer cut off but the focus of absolutely everything.
Outside the ship, I began to see what I had done.
The thing had been shattered by the single plasma cannon blast. It floated away from Cradle, one vast wing spinning gracefully aside from its body, a haze of smaller debris spreading from the impact point. Broken, its body now looked more solid than ever.
I frowned. Tears pressed at my eyes. What have I done? The shape was receding, shoved away from the Cradle by the force of the plasma bloom, and suddenly the other four objects swooped in to surround it. They reached for it with incredibly fine tendrils, invisible until now. They moved in even closer, hiding the damaged thing with their own flexing wings.
For a moment I imagined their attention turned on me. I was still the focus, the centre of whatever terrible thing had happened, and I tried to retreat
into myself, curling up in my seat and crying out as their vast intelligences moved across and through me. Then they cast me aside, and in the blink of an eye they swept away, a blur across the darkness, a pale dot no brighter than a distant star, and then nothing.
Shivering and hugging myself, I stared after them.
“––back online,” Cradle said, the AI’s familiar voice startling me. “System checks commencing. Oh. There seems to be a problem.”
Cradle was speaking to us all.
* * *
“I know how difficult this next part must be,” Olivia says. “After all, Geena…”
The name of my love rings hollow to me. I’ve repeated it so many times to myself since waking, out loud and in my mind, that it has ceased being a real word and become a sound, like a sigh or a sob. Hearing it spoken by someone else, it sounds like a foreign language.
“It’s not that,” I say. We’re sitting on a slight rise around which the river curves. An ox-bow lake, I remember from Earth-lessons on the ship. The gentle slopes are spiked with tall, thin trees, their canopies alive with twittering birds and hundreds of butterflies. Bees and other insects buzz and speckle the air. I almost recognise some of the birds, and some of the butterfly species might be familiar. An insect with six wings lands on my hand, and even as it sinks its proboscis into the flesh between thumb and forefinger, I do not swat it or flick it away.
How can I? It’s alive, and more amazing than anything humankind has ever created or achieved.
Even coming here.
“It’s just that I feel so far away from home,” I say. “So far away from everything.”
“This is your home now,” she says. There’s a tenderness to her voice, one that I’ve never heard in a machine. Cradle could joke and mock, sound stern or flat, but I had never heard true emotion in the AI’s voice, only an impersonation. Geena and I had argued about that. She’d always believed that the ship was as alive as any of us. If that were true, then that meant one more death on my hands.
I study the insect feeding on my blood. True life. Nothing artificial there.
“My home, and yet I’ll be on trial for mass murder.”
“Not murder.”
I shrug. “Same thing.”
“Not at all. It’s … a formality.”
I laugh, and it feels good. I haven’t laughed like that for some time, not from the belly. Maybe it’s the fresh air. Olivia seems confused at my reaction.
“After coming so far,” I say, waving one hand as I recover from my guffaw. “So far, so long, only to find you made it here before me. It’s all too much.” I hold my head. “I’m really not sure we’re built to accept such extreme times and distances.”
I think of that face staring at me, a reflection of my own and yet knowing and understanding so much more. And I know this is true. We’re not wired to understand any of this.
No one has talked much about the past––not Luke, and certainly not Olivia. I assume it’s because their task is to extract as much of the truth out of me as they can. Perhaps after all this time they really do feel sorry for me.
Cradle had been travelling for three hundred years by the time I was born, fleeing a dying Earth and bearing hope for the future of humanity. Its journey had another four hundred years to go before reaching its intended destination, a Goldilocks planet in the Canis Major constellation. Mine was one of the generations destined to live their lives ensuring that those sleeping millions arrived there safe and sound. During those three hundred years, technology must have advanced at a huge rate. Faster ships were built, powered by more effective star drives. Ambition and the need to reach the stars grew. Sometime during our travels we were overtaken, and these others arrived on the planet long before we were ever due.
Cradle must have become a sad, guilty memory for those new settlers.
I was never meant to feel grass between my toes, or the prick of an insect’s bite, or to see the sweep of this mighty river eroding its way through time on a planet almost a hundred light years from Earth.
“Your story is amazing,” Olivia says, and I realise then that she doesn’t believe me. What I don’t understand is why. This new planet, with its vast swathes of life, means that the universe is singing with alien species.
If she can see this six-winged insect on my hand, why can she not believe in space angels?
“You’ve only heard the beginning,” I say. The insect flits away from my hand. I hope that my blood nurtures it.
* * *
My first thought was, what have I done?
My second: Geena!
I rose from my seat, unsteady on my feet, and staggered to the door. It failed to open, and I had to stroke the manual pad three times before it worked. Out in the hallway, I sensed that something was terribly wrong. There seems to be a problem, Cradle had said, but what was it?
I paused, standing still and trying to make out exactly what was amiss. The ship hummed and vibrated as usual. But there was more air movement than normal––somewhere, too many doors were open. When I approached a comm-point and activated the screen, a subtle red warning light pulsed across the hologram display.
“What’s the problem?” I asked, and the display changed. On the left was a selection of status updates, most of them green. But a very important one glowed red.
Drive: suspended.
I frowned. Cradle operated under a continuous, very subtle acceleration––minimal fuel required, an almost imperceptible shove––intended over the centuries to shove the craft to a significant percentage of the speed of light. That drive function was now halted. Cradle continued to move incredibly quickly, but we were no longer accelerating.
On the right side of the display, the real problem began to flash.
Cryo facility: system crash.
“Oh my God.” I didn’t believe in God. Few of the crew did, born as we were into a culture and lifestyle of pure science. But ancient learnings were available to us all, as was the terminology of our ancestors. There were always exceptions, and Geena was one of them. Her faith bemused and fascinated me, and I wondered what she would think about what I had done and who, or what, I had killed.
Now, the sleepers were waking. All of them.
My heart missed a beat. The enormity of what this represented could not hit home. It was too vast, and too unbelievable.
“Cradle, please elaborate on cryo system crash.”
“The whole system has failed,” Cradle said. “Cryo generators have lost power, and pods are coming offline in their thousands.”
“How? What about the fail safes?” I knew from discussions with Geena that the cryo systems were the most protected on the ship; with three independently powered and routed fail safes for each nursery.
“Outside influence. All fail safes have failed.”
“Those things.”
“Specifically, I believe it was the one you killed.”
I tried to absorb all of this. It was too much, too difficult. Geena is down there, I thought, because she was involved in the constant monitoring of the sleepers’ health. She would be frantic right now, trying to figure out how she could help while the techs were doing their best to put right whatever had gone wrong.
Outside influence.
I wondered if she already knew what I had done.
“How long until they’re fully awake?” I asked. There would be a thousand people asking Cradle a thousand questions all over the ship, and it would be answering each and every one in a personal manner. That was the nature of an AI. For me, it was the aspect that made it seem so unnatural.
I had never known exactly how many sleeping people we carried. They were cargo, and as I would never actually meet any of them I had never considered them as living, breathing entities. Someone had once told me we carried about three million souls, their lives suspended in time. Geena estimated more like nine million. No one but Cradle knew for sure, because only Cradle was in charge of the whole ship. It was both craft and captain.
“They are not waking,” Cradle said.
“What?” I didn’t really hear what it had said. The idea of millions of people surfacing from cryo sleep at the same time, that mysterious pausing of life, and suddenly waking up was horrendous. It was disastrous. Cradle was built to support several thousand crew, not several million confused, weak, wandering souls.
They would be naked. Cold. Hungry.
“They’re dying,” Cradle said.
My heart jumped, fluttered, as if to remind me of the fragility of life.
“Dying?”
“Cryo system has crashed. The waking process is a complex as the processes used to put them into suspension. The whole system has failed. The suspension has ended, and the waking protocol has thus not initiated. They are no longer asleep.”
“They’re all dead?”
“As good as.”
“As good as? What the fuck does that mean? You’re an AI, you don’t use terms like that. That doesn’t actually mean anything.”
“I’m an intelligence,” Cradle said. “I’m upset.”
“Upset,” I whispered.
“I’m doing my best, you must know that,” Cradle said. “But all indicators point to it being hopeless. I think what you did––”
“For fuck’s sake, this isn’t my fault!”
“You’re the only Edge-tech who fired a plasma blast,” Cradle said. “For fuck’s sake.”
I ran. I needed to find Geena. I couldn’t understand or comprehend what was happening. It was all too much, too monumental, too disastrous. Everything I knew had changed in an instant, and the awful idea that I had caused that change pressed in around me. I felt as if the atmospheric pressure had suddenly increased––my ears were compressed, my surroundings distant. I was panicking. Nothing could have prepared me for this, no amount of routine disaster training. No one had really expected anything to ever go wrong – not this wrong.
I fled my section of Edge, jumping onto a rail tube and instructing it to take me in towards the Core. From there I could go south, three thousand metres to where Geena’s MediTech headquarters was nestled above the fifth of the great cryo halls. I had only been there a couple of times before, and I tried to imagine what might be happening there now, in that vast chamber where humanity’s hope was meant to sleep away this desperate, incredible journey.