Lost Among the Stars

by Paul Di Filippo

  Pete designated a camp at dusk, a seemingly random spot much like any neighboring site. A fire was kindled, the last of Ruy’s MRE’s apportioned, and Big Dog was shut down, its dynamo disabled to prevent Ruy from making a midnight escape.

  As the Slykes and Ruy sat around the campfire, on a star-spangled night finally exhibiting some of the pre-Greenhouse chill once deemed “normal” for October, Pete felt free to reveal something of his scheme to Ruy.

  “Do you know about mining synthicrobes?”

  “Yes, of course. You sow them and they aggregate whatever mineral or other substance they were programmed to harvest.”

  “Well, I have sown some in this very valley, and they are about to deliver.”

  “Deliver what?”

  “A dinosaur. A Gorgosaurus, to be exact. My pet species.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s simple. A stroke of genius on my part, if I may say so, but still conceptually simple. None of the self-styled experts thought my idea had merit. They all laughed, in fact. But you’ll all soon bear witness to how well it works.”

  Made captive, sexed-up almost against his will, deprived of mental contact with his skin, half-starved and trotted hither and yon, Ruy found his patience just about at an end. “Okay, you’re not in the lecture hall any more, professor.” Ruy’s ineffectual sarcasm betokened his Canadian origins as effectively as his passport. “Just give!”

  Pete remained cheerful. “I contracted with a Hong Kong tailoring firm, and they produced a synthicrobe smart enough to dig for fossils. Specifically, this model targets remnant Gorgosaurus DNA, however fragmentary. Whenever they find a relevant fossil, working from their complete onboard plans, they excavate it from the rock matrix.”

  Despite himself, Ruy was impressed. “That is pretty cool. A definite advance in paleontology, I’d say. I’m surprised the idea was rejected out of hand. There must be more to it than that.”

  “Yes. The bugs are also assembling the complete skeleton underground, in situ. Burrowing and moving bits about. As you can imagine, it’s been a long slow process.”

  “Is that all?”

  Pete smiled, his hood-framed face illuminated in an eerie, horror-show-host manner by flickering flames. “No. A second set of synthicrobes is fleshing out the skeleton a bit. Just enough to get it mobile. Creating any missing bony parts, and linking everything with artificial sinews, muscles, and ganglia. All synthesized from ambient minerals and biomass.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Having these bugs sartorized cost me my entire retirement fund. You’ll see in the morning whether I’m lying or not.”

  Ruy contemplated this revelation. Then he asked, “What kind of dinosaur is Gorgosaurus?”

  “A T. Rex.”

  And with that, the formal cocktail hour was over and the Slykes retired for the evening.

  Ruy slept fitfully all night, dreaming of various disasters, many involving Godzilla and other kaiju. Finally, he woke from the phantasm of facing Chinese water torture—to find that his chest and face were actually wet. Was it raining? Dawn seemed imminent in a clear sky, but the Slykes still slept. Ruy sat up.

  Proty stood beside him. Still dripping, the protoplasmic drone blurrily resembled a beaver or other amphibious mammal, with broad tail and webbed paws. A damp trail led to the riverbank. As Ruy watched, the drone morphed to its doughboy shape.

  Ruy held up his tethered wrists and whispered, “Get these off me, Proty.”

  The drone examined the living handcuffs by manual palpation. Their normal release was mediated by thinking cap. But now a sizzling sound came to Ruy, as Proty dispensed something corrosive. Ruy’s hands came free. Shortly the bonds on his ankles met the same fate.

  Ruy gained his feet as silently as he could. His one objective was to put as much distance between himself and the Slykes as possible. He’d return with law enforcement professionals to round them up—

  Ruy’s arms were yanked back behind him in a brutal wrestler’s grip. Patton Mantooth had crept up from the rear and pinioned him.

  The other Slykes were soon awakened to confront the foiled escapee in the rosy early light of day.

  Pete faced Ruy. “Is this how you repay—”

  The renegade academic’s words were cut short by the hailstorm rattle of a shower of soil and stones. Everyone turned to face the disturbance.

  A large swath of ground on the far side of the river was heaving and churning in a localized quake, like dirt porridge in a hot cauldron.

  The top of a large polished skull poked up into the air. Then, explosively, the rest of the Gorgosaurus launched into view, as if springing from an underground diving board.

  The towering, titanic dinosaur was a nightmare in white and black. The dirty white of its fossilized bones, threaded with black carbon-nanotube sinews and muscles. Distributed ebony ganglia clung like clusters of grapes to its frame. This lacework but substantial apparition resembled an old-fashioned plastinated corpse: flensed, with all its subdermal mechanisms on display.

  “Gertie!” yelled Pete ecstatically. “Gertie lives!”

  Ruy turned to Rachel. “Gertie?”

  “It’s what he’s always called her. After some old cartoon. She’s animated by some apps downloaded from the Jurassic Park MUD. Should be pretty safe.…”

  Besotted, Pete darted forward, right into the shallow river up to his knees. “Come to Papa, Gertie! Pick me up now! Time for walkies!”

  The dinosaur’s little arms did not respond properly. Furrowing his brow, Pete plainly found his telemetry to the stitched-together revenant being ignored, due to unforeseen cascading glitches within Gertie’s independent onboard processing units.

  “Gertie—” Pete began.

  And then, in a blink, the Gorgosaurus had Pete in its jaws.

  Everyone screamed.

  A crunching and grinding noise marked Pete’s gory demise.

  Patton had instinctively released Ruy. The Slykes began to back away from the dinosaur. Yet in the open level land, there was no escape.

  But Ruy had a hope.

  “Give me a thinking cap! Now!”

  No one reacted fast enough, so he peeled back Patton’s hood and grabbed the cyber-reticule off his head. He slapped it hurriedly on his own scalp, then picked up Proty. The drone nestled automatically against Ruy’s chest, like a friendly koala.

  “I’m sorry, pal. I hope you understand.”

  Ruy popped up Proty’s onboard menu, raced through some choices, then sent the command that turned Proty into a dedicated factory for pumping out a certain self-replicating attack synthicrobe keyed to carbon nanotubes.

  Inexplicably, a second window opened up in Ruy’s vision. It depicted not any local feed, but rather a recorded snippet. The little loop showed the UCalgary kennel, with Dr. Grigori bending over to stroke the recording entity: Proty in his nest.

  The Gorgosaurus was crossing the river now, its mountainous tread shaking the ground. Closer, closer, swaying head lowering to gobble—

  Ruy could wait no longer. With all his strength he hurled Proty into the monster’s open mouth. A stone tooth pierced the drone as if it were a ripe grape, and Proty splattered his contents.

  The rapidly autocatalytic bugs proliferated up and down the network of carbon nanotubes. In seconds the substance they secreted began to eat away at the black fibers. First the lower jaw of the Gorgosaurus fell off, and then in a swift cascade all its other parts clattered and splashed separately to the ground and river.

  The Slykes had paused in their desperate scramble. Ruy asserted himself boldly into their leaderless pecking order. “Get Big Dog alive, and put Pete’s body on it. We’re heading back to civilization.”

  As they marched off, Ruy snugged his thinking cap on more firmly and ran some diagnostics on his Nuvaderm.

  It was good to feel comfortable again in his own skin.

  Everyone has surely heard the famous quip by Winston Churchill: “I’m going to
make a long speech because I’ve not had the time to prepare a short one.” The element of truth behind the joke is undeniable, and applies to storytelling as well. Writing a novel, you can almost stuff it willy-nilly full of whatever occurs to you and still have it be a success. Writing a moderately sized short story, you have to pare everything down to essentials. And writing flash fiction—short-short tales such as “Wavehitcher”—you have to practically be a Japanese haiku artist, conveying immensities with a few lines. But the challenge is enticing, and the results, if you succeed, are perfect for this age of limited time and limited attention spans. Nonetheless, I will never tell a story in 140-character tweets!

  It’s wonderful that Nature magazine, bastion of superb hard-science research, consents to publish these mini-romps.

  Wavehitcher

  At a point roughly one hundred nautical miles northeast out of its home port of Hilo, Hawaii, on a routine fisheries patrol, the US Coast Guard Cutter Kiska encountered a wavehitcher.

  Standing on the bridge and employing his digital recording binoculars, Captain Don Ruffin swore, heedless of how his intemperance would look on the official record. This idiot of a wavehitcher was going to cost him endless paperwork and delay. Briefly, he debated letting the fool perish. But then, unbidden, came the lyrics of the Coast Guard’s service song, “Semper Paratus.” “To sink the foe or save the maimed,/Our mission and our pride.” Captain Ruffin sighed, put down his binocs, and addressed Lieutenant Commander Billie Schafer with more wistfulness than hope.

  “Have you pinged that AUV yet, Lieutenant? Maybe it’s authorized to carry a technician or scientist on a short-term basis.”

  “Negative, sir. It’s a Liquid Robotics MANTA model, licensed to the C-More group at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. Strictly an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle. Tasked to conduct a survey of microbial ecology.”

  “All right then. We’ve got an illegal rider. Let’s haul him in.” Submitting to a sudden impulse, Captain Ruffin added, “I’m going on the pickup ride, Lieutenant Commander. You have the Kiska.”

  At the starboard side, seamen were unlimbering the cutter’s rigid-hull inflatable and getting it launched. Wearing his smart life vest, Captain Ruffin was soon skimming across the warm green waters.

  The wavehitcher must have sensed their approach, through vibrations alone. But there was no place he could flee, no action he could take. So he just continued to trail the slowly moving AUV at the length of the tether he had secured to its stubby mast.

  The MANTA craft was a sleek hull bristling with sensors and solar panels and communications devices. Unseen, well below the surface, were the attached set of vanes that propelled the AUV simply by taking advantage of the constant up-and-down movements of the craft.

  Captain Ruffin had been prepared to see the wavehitcher clad in a typical joyrider’s amateur rig. But no, this wavehitcher sported very high-tech gear. Could he be a pirate, or a terrorist even? What could be his objective, out here in the middle of nowhere? He wasn’t even in a registered shipping lane, and the MANTA was no doubt programmed to avoid such busy corridors. Still, Captain Ruffin could take no chances, and so he ordered one of his men to train a weapon on the trespasser.

  Soon they had grappled the man aboard. He made no resistance, and the only difficulty arose in dealing with a capacious seine of some sort that had been attached to the wavehitcher, trailing unseen beneath the sea.

  Sitting under armed guard, the wavehitcher exhibited no nervous body language in his superhero wetsuit, which covered even his head. Instead, he slowly lifted his hands up to remove his goggles and breathing apparatus, the latter just a simple snorkel. Friendly blue eyes in a tanned surfer’s face and a big ingenuous smile greeted his captors.

  “Hey, sapes, what’s filtering? You need my help with something?”

  Captain Ruffin stared incredulously. “What is your name?”

  “Andy Weeden. But you can call me ‘Weed.’ Everybody does.”

  “Mr. Weeden, are you aware that you were trespassing on the property of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology?”

  “How you figure that, sapes? They don’t own the ocean. Nobody does.”

  “But this is their registered drone, legal property of the Institute.”

  “I know that. I was just drifting friendly-like alongside.”

  “Nonsense! You were tethered to its mast!”

  “All right, all right, so I was hitching a ride. I wasn’t hurting it none.”

  “And exactly where did you think you were heading?”

  “This probe is programmed to come within ten miles of Midway. I figured on swimming the rest of the way into shore.”

  Captain Ruffin’s jaw dropped. “But—but that’s fifteen hundred nautical miles away! At the rate the MANTA travels, it would take you six weeks to get there!”

  “No problem, sapes! My goggles are smart, my earbuds high-quality and my haptic controls totally sizzling. The internet feed I tapped from the MANTA was zealous! Besides, I had a lot of thinking to do. Six weeks would have been just about right. You see, my girlfriend is on Midway. We had a scandonkulous fight, and she left before I could apologize and make up. She works for the Fish and Wildlife Service on the Atoll, and they’ve interdicted all civilians, ’cuz of that stupid Chinese situation. This was the only way I could get to see her.”

  “How did you intend to survive?”

  Weed was happy to explain: His smartsuit employed nanoporous graphene membranes to desalinate plenty of drinking water. An array of pulsed magnets repelled sharks. And his seine caught krill and processed it into a nutritious paste routed into a CamelBak reservoir.

  “Just call me a one-man cruise ship!” Weed boasted.

  The inflatable pulled up to the Kiska. Weed looked forlorn.

  “C’mon, sapes, you’re not gonna stand in the path of true love, are you?”

  Captain Ruffin looked at his grinning seamen, then said, “Throw him back, he’s undersized.”

  Sometimes for a science fiction writer, the “hero” of a story is the technology. Scholars and critics and readers of classical literature might find this abominable. “Humans must be at the center of every fiction!” Well, yes, you need a human—or some otherwise sentient—cast of characters. But try telling Clarke (Rendezvous with Rama) or Niven (Ringworld) that their Big Dumb Objects were not just as important as the sapient members of their narratives, and see where that gets you!

  The notion that super-materials as yet unperfected could radically revolutionize our culture and create some weird, eye-popping effects was enough motive to make me pen this small excursion. Madame Bovary it ain’t!

  Life in the Carbyne Age

  Barnaby Owen was rich by any standards, thanks to his foresighted investments in Mitsubishi’s orbital solar power array. So the pleasant prospect of dining out in one of the world’s most expensive restaurants, the Sherpa Room atop Mount Everest’s summit, just to impress the new woman in his life, did not trouble his e-wallet at all.

  Barnaby was meeting with Mitsubishi executives in Tokyo on the morning of March 23, 2044, when Kiana Mance phoned him with her acceptance of his invitation.

  “Barn Owl, dearest, I’ve cancelled my rehearsal for today and tomorrow, just so we can be together tonight.”

  Kiana was phoning from Rome, where the famous Cirque de la Lune was currently getting ready to open their spring season. Kiana’s act involved her heavily augmented body in an astonishing routine of aerial gymnastics, culminating in a veritable orgy of aerogel clouds, flying miniature transgenic lions, simulated drone attacks, and a soft landing for her nude form modulated by programmable water jets.

  “Wonderful!” said Barnaby with real enthusiasm. Of course, he was sub-vocalizing into his electromyogram mic, while listening to Kiana over his implanted earbuds and enjoying her image on his memtax. Having signaled a break for this important incoming call, Barnaby had tacitly allowed the Japanese executives to agreeably fugue out with their own communicati
ons suites.

  Thoughts of Kiana’s talents being employed in his bedroom sent uncommon thrills down his spine. “Let’s see,” he said, “it’s about five thousand kilometers from Tokyo to Everest, and a bit more for you from Rome. Let’s call it four hours of travel for me and about five for you. I promise you it will be the evening of a lifetime.”

  Kiana ended the call with air kisses, and Barnaby returned to business.

  The nearest Tokyo station for the global hypertube system was moderately busy. But unlike the subways of yore, there was no crowding. Barnaby simply queued up until he reached the head of the line and stepped into a one-person capsule.

  “The Sherpa Room, please,” Barnaby told the system.

  The opaque capsule hermetically sealed itself and was shunted through the airlock interface until it reached the main tube with its partial vacuum, where it was deftly inserted into the traffic stream. Linear induction motors and the capsule’s own air compressor took over to accelerate Barnaby to the 1200 KPH cruising speed. The tube entered the sea at Nagasaki, its carbyne walls fully up to the transition and pressures. Stronger than diamond, stronger than its cousin graphene, self-assembling carbyne had made the creation of the worldwide hypertube transit system possible.

  During his trip Barnaby worked a bit; amused himself by tinkering with various personal endings for last year’s interactive hit, Justice League XII (Barnaby identified heavily with Darkseid); and anal-obsessively reconfirmed his room reservation at the hotel that adjoined the Sherpa Room. Already he could picture Kiana sprawled across the bed there. The image prompted him to call her, but her phone was offline. She must be sleeping, he imagined, as her own capsule barreled across the Reformed Caliphate toward Tibet.

  At the scheduled arrival time, Barnaby stepped out into the hypertube station atop Mount Everest. An incredible nighttime storm was raging impressively here, nearly nine thousand meters above sea level, but Barnaby and the other patrons were safe behind the terminal’s tough walls of microalloy palladium glass.