Wincing with the effort, she pressed her receptors directly over the speaker. The device was designed to sone through water, not air, but her body seemed to work as a decent medium. Immediately she heard the faint words:
“orange, green, blue, yellow. speak. orange, green, blue, yellow. please speak.”
They were calling her, spelling out the colors of her name as best they could via sound.
She soned a reply, expecting it to hurt more than it did. Compared to the rest of her injuries, the sensation of soning through air felt almost pleasant. Their response came quickly.
“received. received. where you? whirlpool here.”
A whirlpool? The explosion in the hole had triggered a whirlpool! It all made sense to her now; whirlpools were simply the sucking of water from the high-pressure ocean, through the ice, to the zero-pressure of Outside.
She began to explain the situation to whomever was listening. It would have been a difficult explanation even if she could chrome, let alone using the paltry soning vocabulary, but somehow she managed to convey the basic story: she had discovered Outside.
She told them that for the next expedition, they should bring pressure suits, heaters, thermal shielding, light filters, cameras and recording equipment. She told them to watch the colored spheres and figure out what they could tell the Rygors about the rest of the universe.
It was only at the very end that she realized she had been soning with Boro for the entire conversation. She couldn’t hear any emotion in his electronic voice, but somehow it still came through when he said goodbye.
Ogby somehow found the strength to sone one last sentence.
“WE MEET WHEN YOU COME OUTSIDE.”
Leaning back on the remnants of her frozen water, Ogby’s gaze through the window fell upon the large sphere that she had just discovered, far below. Was the sphere chroming to her? she dimly wondered. Telling her all the secrets of the universe? She tried to focus, but the last shreds of her attention could only note the sphere’s most prominent feature, gazing back at her. When Ogby’s consciousness finally slipped away, her final mental image was of that great, red spot.
Afterword
The appearance of the great red spot at the end of this story is supposed to indicate the setting. Specifically, this story takes place in the interior of Europa: an icy moon of Jupiter with a large ocean under the ice. Despite the very low surface temperatures, Europa’s ocean does not freeze solid thanks to “tidal heating” from a slightly-eccentric orbit around Jupiter (in turn due to another moon, Io). The slight deviations in the distance between Europa and Jupiter result in a cyclic compression of Europa, with the same frequency as Europa’s orbit. Europa’s orbital period is the duration of the unit “flex” used in the story, as these compressions would be measurable from inside the moon.
The Rygors are an advanced lifeform living in Europa’s ocean, very roughly modeled off octopi. The food chain is powered by hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, similar to known deep-sea ecosystems on Earth. But the Rygors are not neutrally-buoyant like most terrestrial ocean creatures. Instead, each of their five arms has a small air bladder, which pulls them up to the top of the ocean, on the underside of Europa’s crust-ice layer. (Presumably the Rygors use some biochemical reaction to produce a gas that can fill these bladders.) There are no hydrothermal vents up at the ice, so all of their food supply has to come via fish-like organisms that swim in the ocean.
The story is told from the Rygors’ perspective: the underside of the ice is their “ground”, and the buoyancy force from their air bladders defines the direction “down”. From their perspective they walk on the “ground”, and are pulled to it by “gravity”; from our outside-Europa perspective they are simply buoyant.
This inversion of our usual perspective makes for some unusual situations. We humans don’t have a fear of being swept upwards to our death if we climb a high mountain. But this what induces Ogby’s ‘fear of heights’; not falling, but being swept “upwards” if she gets too “high”.
The analogous concern from our perspective would be a scuba diver who gets too deep. Divers wear a Buoyancy Compensator device, or “BC”, that can be inflated or deflated as desired. If a diver did not properly regulate the BC, descending into regions of higher pressure causes the BC volume to be compressed by the surrounding water. This would make it less buoyant — in principle sending an unwitting diver to the bottom of the ocean. (Archimedes’ Principle tells us that the upward buoyancy force on an object is equal to the weight of the displaced fluid.) As the diver’s BC gets compressed, it displaces less water, and becomes less buoyant. Flip this picture upside down, and this scenario is exactly what Ogby feared in the opening scene: that she would be unable to physically counter the exterior pressure, and she would find her air bladders compressed to the point where they provided very little buoyancy. From her perspective, buoyancy is gravity, so the gravity diminished as she climbed the mountain.
Hopefully the above explanation is enough physics background to follow some of the other curious aspects of the story. At one point I toyed with the idea of making this the beginning of a much longer story, allowing Ogby to be rescued on the surface of Europa by human visitors. The present version doesn’t say what happens next, one way or the other, so it’s not necessarily a sad ending. It just requires your imagination to continue the tale.
© The Author 2017
Michael Brotherton (ed.)Science Fiction by ScientistsScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-41102-6_2
The Tree of Life
Jennifer Rohn1
(1)London, UK
She would never forget the day they came. Although it wouldn’t be difficult to remember, as “never” would only last, in the end, a few short months. This was clear from the outset. After that, she wouldn’t need to remember anything, ever again.
She was working late, the last one in the lab. It was summer, though you wouldn’t know it from the careful chill of the air, set at a humidity-controlled, regulation-standard 18 degrees centigrade. She was focused on the work spread out in front of her: a rack of small Eppendorf tubes; a plastic microtiter plate with its rectangular matrix of tiny wells; the precision pipettors arrayed from left to right in strict size order, with their gridded disposable tips close by. The open notebook, where she still scribbled terse phrases and diagrams with a pen, much to the amusement of her younger colleagues.
As usual, she was planning her latest experiment on the fly, deciding which conditions to tweak just seconds before she pipetted the key bits of liquid or protein or reconstituted nanobots into the appropriate well of the microtiter plate. It was a habit that drove Paul crazy — Paul, who typed out everything neatly the night before: one copy for upload, one for himself and one for his technician. Paul, who practically scheduled his bathroom breaks into the experimental protocol. She had long since stopped trying to explain the way her brain worked — how she could close her eyes and lean into the void and feel her way unerringly to the right way of teasing out the truth.
“Eight point five microliters,” she decided out loud at the last possible moment, squirting a droplet of the precious ‘bots into one of the tubes and mixing it with a practiced flick. After so many years at the bench, she could perform the necessary mathematics without even thinking. Sure, the Machine could do everything for her, but at this stage of the work — that fevered, just-about-to-break-through phase — she selfishly wanted the epiphany all to herself. Soon enough she’d have to slog through her notebook and the various printouts, assemble the electronic data (suitably sanitized) and upload it to the Institute servers for scrutiny. But today, this moment was hers alone.
She became aware, as she worked, of a growing warmth on the edge of her vision, a peculiar rosy tinge to the lab’s normal sterile white. It was not, at first, peculiar enough to distract her. But then a shaft of sunlight set fire to the glass beaker of liquid at her elbow, spangled the microtiter plate with reflected molten blobs. The various
abstractions she’d been juggling in her head — dilutions, concentrations, the rows and columns of the microtiter plate — shattered into shards as she glanced out the window.
The sun was setting over Puget Sound, the sky streaked with dusky pastels. This, in itself, wasn’t so out of the ordinary. With a coveted waterside view near the top of the twelve-story building, her lab window had featured any number of gorgeous sunsets over the decades she’d worked at the Pike Institute for Advanced Genetics.
No, it was something about the light. She was picking up a sparkling, just at the periphery of her vision. At first she thought she was coming down with a migraine, but when she closed her eyes, the sparkles disappeared. But she’d be hard-pressed to describe the sparkles: did they have a color, a pattern? Somehow the information slid straight into her visual cortex without any metadata. It was…sparkling. Her brain seemed to have never encountered its ilk before, nor binned it into a cluster of neurons, assigned it a label for future use.
At that moment, people all over the world were struggling to describe the sensation, and likewise failing.
***
She had been trained as a virologist just up the road at the university, a few decades back. There, she’d learned that viruses were not truly alive. More intriguingly, they were not even the malicious enemies she’d been led to believe. Instead, they were more like simple nanobots with just one program: blind reproduction at any cost. The fact that human cells were damaged in the process, and that disease resulted, was an accidental by-product of this imperative — she’d particularly liked that bit. She had been most intrigued by viruses that deployed their genes in a ridiculously precise order, the so-called ‘immediate early’ genes preceding the early genes, which in turn paved the way for the middle genes, which would then prepare the ground for the late genes. The economy, the elegance — not a single piece of genetic code wasted. If she could live her own life like that, she would.
Later, as she became one of the world’s experts in ultra-compact genetic engineering, she began to riff off those viral strategies in her own work. Most of what she did was routine agricultural stuff that didn’t need the genetic flourishes she couldn’t resist building in — Paul teased her that it was like hiring Michelangelo to put a fresh layer of paint on the kitchen cabinets.
No one had been surprised by how much plants loved the high-CO2 world, but their edible parts being less nutritious had been a blow, in a world with vanishing shorelines and a hungry population just approaching ten billion. To make a worthy but dull story short, she was crafting trees that could make ultra-protein-rich fruit — the apple being her preferred species. This was Washington State, after all. But her heart wasn’t in it.
So when Paul proposed that she join him on “a little side project,” she’d leapt at the chance.
***
“How would you like to travel back with me a few billion years?”
Paul — the Institute’s resident molecular evolution expert — sauntered into the lab one morning, his crisply pressed day-glow Hawaiian shirt pulsating under the fluorescence.
“It depends: do they have decent coffee there?”
“No — but plenty of primordial soup.”
He slouched against her lab bench and proceeded to rhapsodize about the Earth’s humble beginnings. She knew the story already, but only in dry textbook form, a long-since forgotten lecture in a stuffy hall. The way he told it, she could almost see it, smell it. The acidic seas, the funk of gases seeping from the rocks. All of creation, as an ordered series of steps: the self-assembly of organic molecules. Their dispassionate desire to replicate. The co-opting of a membrane shell to keep the components separate and tidy. Stumbling over the means to eat light and breathe out oxygen into the world, making it possible for oxygen-loving life to evolve — a spark of green that flared into a trillion possibilities.
“I’ve been working with NASA on one of their terraforming projects,” Paul said. “Advising them on what sort of attributes their first bacteria ought to have.”
“How are you deciding what’s important?”
“Well, they asked me to base it mostly on what we know about the first bacteria on our planet — inferred from the traces they’ve left in modern bacterial DNA.”
She felt a little tingle — a tingle that was only too rare these days. “But we could do a lot better than that. Assuming NASA doesn’t want to wait billions of years for the result.”
“Exactly. You want in? I told Parsons that we needed help.”
“She’s okay with it?”
“As long as the apple project keeps moving, you’re free to give me a hand.” As he was leaving the room: “Oh, it’s confidential, OK? Only me and Parsons know. We’re not even supposed to upload data onto the Institute server — I’ll give you the details of the encrypted protocol later.”
***
A few minutes after she’d noticed the strange quality of the light, he entered the room.
She looked up, expecting Paul, but it wasn’t Paul. It was a stranger, an average-looking man — with a faint sparkle to him. Dressed casually, jeans and a buttoned-down shirt with the ID badge tucked into the breast pocket.
Friendly. Firm. Hi, my name is Shaun. Listen, here’s how it is.
No words were exchanged — at least, she didn’t think so — but the entire scenario was suddenly lodged into her brain as a detailed memory of a conversation. A conversation held some time ago, so that all the implications were long since processed. The end of it all, and what that meant for her species — for every living thing on earth. What it meant for her, personally: her baby son, gone before he’d learned the words to say I love you, mama. The fiercely-adored husband and the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed at one of her stupid jokes. Her dog Swift, tearing around the beaches after thrown bits of driftwood. Her friends. Paul. Lazy boat rides to Friday Harbor, the ninth inning of a Mariner’s nail-biter. All of it — the unimaginable loss, the consequences, the denial-anger-grief-acceptance of it, compressed into a flat, dimensionless sensation.
It’s nothing personal. He looked genuinely sorry. The way he leaned against her bench was almost exactly the way Paul would have — or rather, the way he used to. Part of her wondered if that was deliberate, if Shaun’s corporeal form was being actively constructed in real time from her thoughts and experiences.
We have a special request for you: teach us about your protein-apple trees.
Why?
We’re interested.
Why? Numb parroting seemed all she was capable of.
Okay, I’ll level with you. My bosses couldn’t give a shit. I’m interested. This is the most boring commission I’ve ever had the misfortune not to be able to decline.
She just stared at him.
I’m a scientist, he went on, not a thug-for-hire like the rest of the crew. At least if I can learn something interesting, it will pass the time. It takes months to fully asset-strip a world of this complexity. Jesus, do you know how many gallons of water are in the Pacific Ocean alone?
***
Nothing had changed inside the Institute’s greenhouses, thank goodness. At least that was something. The minute Shaun left, that first visit, she scurried downstairs to check — instinctively homing in on the place she felt safest. She stood for a moment, closed her eyes and breathed in the loamy scent of decay and death, of life and renewal, of a thousand plants breathing oxygen into the soft, warm air, of worms and insects and bacteria doing their understated legwork to keep the whole show running. The last of their kind, now. As was she.
It was then that the idea came to her — bold, crazy. Impossible. Yet…
She’d require a fully functioning greenhouse for it to work. After a hurried inspection, she was relieved to find that the visitation had had no immediate impact on the dome. The feeding and watering were all automatic. She assumed that the water would stop working eventually, but with demand having ceased, she supposed there was enough in the pipeline to last a fair whi
le. The solar panels were obviously still operational, as the electricity output was normal. Leaving the dome, she went to the staff cafeteria: plenty of non-perishable food stocks to keep her going. Further exploration revealed that the doors and windows of the building were indeed sealed for her protection — as Shaun had explained, she’d be dead in seconds if she ventured outside, even if she had any desire to.
The “sterilization” process had taken only seconds. Shaun’s bosses adhered to a strict health and safety policy about organic life forms — it wouldn’t do to bring anything harmful home along with the minerals, metals, gases and other loot. Not a trace of life remained, except what was inside her building. But, he was quick to assure her, the process had been through rigorous ethical board approval. No life forms had suffered, and the planet itself had been restored to pre-life conditions from an atmospheric and chemical point of view — about the equivalent of 3.8 billion years ago.
A full factory reboot, he remarked, smiling at his own joke.
***
Shaun asked a lot of questions, but he was also a good listener. Despite herself, she enjoyed their scientific chats, which were not much different from an exchange she might have with any colleague from another discipline. She got the feeling that he enjoyed it too. Explain the underlying principles, and any scientist can have a decent debate. She and Shaun lacked even a rudimentary shared vocabulary, as anything to do with carbon-based life was a mere abstraction to him. But he was interested in genetics, and she did her honest best to impart at least a layman’s view of the matter, drawing on years of undergraduate teaching for useful tricks. Like her, he seemed to appreciate its elegance. But the subtleties were beyond him — for now.
Science Fiction by Scientists: An Anthology of Short Stories (Science and Fiction) Page 4