“It was a real pleasure,” he said.
The butler bowed, then passed him a moist napkin. Kepler wiped his mouth and hands with it.
“I didn’t want to bother you while you were eating, but the ninety-niner that you’ve been expecting has announced it will be arriving tomorrow.”
Finally an end to all the waiting. Kepler took a deep breath in and then out. This body was perfect, but he had been getting tired of it, especially in the last few days. He didn’t feel at home in it.
“Thank you very much for the meal,” he said with a faint bow. “I’ll go to my room now.”
“Of course. I’ll wake you in plenty of time before the ship arrives.”
Cycle YA7.4, K2-288Bb
Kepler opened the airlock hatch with a powerful shove. The moisture in the air froze immediately and rose as white vapor. He climbed up the short ladder. By the second step the skin on his hands was already discolored. First it turned white, then gray. Then the skin froze; no wonder, at an exterior temperature of minus 180 degrees. Kepler switched of the pain sensors. He didn’t have time now for ancient biological sensitivities.
The surface was in perpetual twilight. The planet orbited in a captured rotation around its star, K2-288B, which hung like a dim lamp above him. The disk of the sun was large in the sky, but no longer gave off much heat. Many gigacycles ago, this planet must have been in the habitable zone, but now it was dead – and so cold that even the atmosphere had frozen, now spread across the surface in a blanket of snow and ice.
His lungs were stinging. He should be more careful! Kepler stopped breathing. It would be stupid if this body failed before he had reached the ship. He would wake up in another replacement body, but he would have wasted precious time. He had failed to really appreciate it for so long – time. If you’re immortal, it doesn’t hold much meaning. But that had changed since he found out that the end was coming.
Kepler walked across the dry snow, which crunched under each step. His body conducted the sound, which he otherwise wouldn’t be able to sense with no atmosphere. The soles of his sports shoes were thin. He put his right hand into his pants pocket. That wasn’t a good idea, because the skin on the back of his hand came away, revealing the gleaming blue metal underneath. It always disgusted him to see his surrogate body in this state.
The ship came into view. It looked like a huge tin can. It had left its interstellar propulsion system in orbit. For safety reasons it had landed at a distance from Zhenyi’s home. Humans were infallible, but they hadn’t managed to transfer this quality to the things they built. That was the dilemma of the times – and of past gigacycles. Kepler was frequently preoccupied with these kinds of thoughts. It was a problem that humans shared with the God from the Bible. There can be no perfect creation if you don’t acknowledge that you’re too stupid to recognize perfection. This led to only two possible conclusions: either there was no God, or God was one of them. For some reason he preferred the second possibility.
“Hello Kepler,” called the ship’s AI in a female voice. “Nice of you to greet us personally.”
Us? Had the AI split? That happened sometimes when ships were underway too long, but more commonly on ninety-fivers, where onboard time went much slower. Interstellar transporters were usually equipped with at least a level 3 AI. They were much more adaptable, but also more sensitive.
“Well, say something, Kepler,” the AI admonished him. “It’s impolite not to reply.”
“I was just thinking about the ‘us’.”
“Come on, Kepler, don’t you recognize us?”
He was confounded. He had never taken an interest in which AIs controlled which ships. He was only concerned with the cargo. What was up with this AI?
“Kepler, don’t you remember the Convention at Sagittarius A* at all?”
A ship’s AI asking him about the Convention, where it had been decided to end the universe? Then it occurred to him. Of course! There were two people who had set themselves up onboard a ninety-niner, the Curies. But were they also using it as a transporter?
“Marie, Pierre, is that you?”
“Man, it took long enough for the penny to drop,” said a male voice.
He now recognized Pierre Curie’s voice. He had given a speech at the Convention.
“Excuse me,” said Kepler. “I hadn’t expected you to be carrying out transport orders.”
“It presented itself. We wanted to speak with you anyway, and this way you pay us for the trip.”
“I understand. It must have been an enormous coincidence, you seeing my order on HR8799b. Does Zhenyi know about your visit?”
“We’ve been following you for a while, Kepler. You change systems so often it’s as though you’re on the run. We haven’t yet reached Zhenyi, she must be underway somewhere in the direction of the galactic center.”
“What was it you wanted from me?” Kepler asked.
“We’ll explain that over a good red wine. We always have a few bottles in our luggage.”
“Agreed.”
A hatch opened in the ship just above the ground. Kepler only noticed because vapor was pouring out of it, tinted red by the sun. He moved closer. Two rectangular objects emerged side by side. They were lying on a thin trestle that had numerous small, jointed legs. The objects walked their way over to him. The movement looked so absurd – like a cockroach in high heels – that he had to laugh, even though it wasn’t the first time he’d seen it.
“That’s right, laugh at us,” said Marie Curie.
The objects walked past him. They seemed to know where the airlock was located. He moved quickly, which was sweaty work in this high gravity, caught up with them and then walked beside the last one. Without the strange little legs they would look like Snow White coffins. They seemed to be made of glass or some other semi-transparent substance. But the material was so milky that the contents couldn’t be made out. Which of the two caskets contained the cargo he had been waiting so long for?
Next to the personnel airlock, another much bigger hatchway had opened. In the center of it was a platform. The two caskets positioned themselves on it and travelled downwards. Kepler climbed down the ladder into the airlock. He had to wait for it to fill with air. He scratched impatiently at the dead skin on his hand. He should leave it alone, but his excitement was building.
Finally, the door opened. He started breathing again. The air was so warm and moist it made him feel sick. Why hadn’t he noticed that before? The butler beckoned him and led him into the living room. The table was no longer there. The two caskets stood in its place. He arrived just in time to see the left-hand casket open with a squelching sound.
A fit-looking, naked, male torso rose up out of it. The skin was almost without pigment. There was no hair on its head. The creature looked around, then pulled a tube out of its forearm and removed the sensors stuck to its chest. It cleared its throat, but didn’t say anything. Then it supported itself on the edge of the casket and stood up, while the little, thin legs of the casket bent at the knees. Its lower half was also naked. There were no genitalia, or at least none Kepler could make out. He had never seen the Curies like this. He blushed involuntarily. A primitive reaction, he thought. But they could have said something if his presence bothered them.
The creature climbed skillfully out of the casket. It was slightly smaller than he was. Kepler tried to compare his memories of Pierre Curie with the image of this naked being, but couldn’t. Hadn’t the Curies participated at the Convention in another body? He couldn’t remember anymore.
“First of all we’ll take a shower,” said the Curies in Pierre’s voice. “And you’ll obviously need some time to unpack your consignment.”
Kepler had to tear his eyes away from the naked form that Pierre and Marie Curie shared. It made absolute sense economically; they only needed to maintain one body. But he wouldn’t have been able to do it. Another voice in your head – that must be horrible. The Curies had been a couple for gigacycles, but that t
ime surely hadn’t gone by without conflict. And if they had an argument they wouldn’t even be able leave the star system!
The door closed loudly. He was alone. Kepler went and stood beside the second casket. A delicate moment lay ahead of him. How long had he been waiting now to be reunited? He had reached K2-228Bb at the speed of light. He always used a laser transfer when he travelled, even though it was very expensive. But that meant he had to wait longer at the destination, because only the data containing his consciousness could be moved at light speed, not his physical body.
He operated two old-fashioned levers mounted on either side of the casket. Then the lid rose and he was looking himself in the face. It looked wrong, as though left and right had been reversed, but that was how it should look to him, as this wasn’t a mirror image but the original. Before him lay Johannes Kepler, or to be precise, his flesh shell, cloned however many times from his own cells. He had chosen the name himself, ages ago. It was his body and therefore himself. Like most humans, he found it difficult to live outside his shell for long periods, as unsuitable as it may be for survival in space. And now he’d been stuck far too long in this robot.
“Butler, please prepare the transfer,” he said.
“Of course, Johannes.”
He pronounced the ‘J’ correctly. Had he finally repaired his vocalizer?
A door opened to his left. The butler came in with a couple of cables. Kepler opened his shirt.
“We need to repair those hands,” said the butler. “Did you go outside without a suit?”
Kepler nodded.
“You realize that it will mean your death after the transfer?”
“Of course. This isn’t my first time.”
“Good. I’m obliged to point that out to you, it’s protocol.”
The butler attached sensors to Kepler’s chest and temples. Then he guided a cable into his ear. It tickled. The butler then connected the cables to the body in the casket.
“That’s it,” he said. “You can start the transfer.”
“Thank you.”
The butler left. Kepler deactivated the robot’s skeletal system so it wouldn’t collapse and be damaged. Then he summoned the body’s vital signs into his field of vision. The body temperature was 32 degrees, the heart was beating once per minute. Going in would be uncomfortable. There was a reason the Curies preferred travelling in their shared body.
Kepler took a deep breath. Then his thoughts gave the command to begin.
It was cold. Freezing cold. Bloody cold. Fucking cold. He searched feverishly for curse words to distract him from the cold. His heart was hammering. He tried to call up his heart rate into his field of vision, but nothing happened. Then he remembered he was back in his body. If he wanted to see something his five senses weren’t made for, he needed an external device. He rubbed his hands together. His muscles didn’t obey at first, but gradually things improved. He touched his body. Where he couldn’t feel anything he rubbed vigorously. He warmed himself up from the outside in. Maybe he should have raised the room temperature first. Then he noticed how warm it seemed to be. The butler must have thought of that himself.
The pain gradually became bearable. He pulled his legs in towards his body. The muscles tingled intensely, but obeyed his command. He gripped the edge of the casket with his arms and pulled himself upright. Why was it so difficult? Of course. This planet was significantly larger than the Earth. If he were to plan any long hikes he’d need an exoskeleton. But there was no reason to spend long periods on the surface.
He was sitting. The feeling was coming back into his skin. He had done it, he was back in his body. He was no longer all-powerful and invincible. In his body he was vulnerable. Without tools, he wouldn’t survive long. It was as if this alone had given life new meaning.
Kepler new the feeling well. He’d lost count how many times he’d already been through this. The body only ever lasted a few hundred cycles, then he had to move on. He was more or less addicted to travelling, it was his drug. It helped him to block out the current state of the world. The Curies were right, he was on the run; he was running from pure existence. Each of the maybe ten thousand humans that still existed solved this problem in their own way, because it was difficult to watch others dying. It would be unbearable if the universe itself was to die a slow death.
Cycle YA7.5, K2-288Bb
“Do you know where this ash came from?”
The Curies were crouching in front of the fireplace in which the fire had burned two days ago, fingering the remnants with their left hand.
“No idea,” he said.
“The ash is still slightly warm,” said Pierre’s voice.
“The butler turned up the heating in here yesterday, to make my transfer easier.”
The Curies stood up. Their face smiled stiffly.
“You’re lying, but we’ll leave it at that,” said Marie.
Of course he was lying. He couldn’t exactly admit that he had allowed the entropy to be increased in such a senseless way. The universe was about to die because it was losing energy and chaos was increasing, and he was burning essential resources to ash?
“No, I’m not lying. I didn’t light a fire.”
And that was true. He cleared his throat.
“I actually came here to be alone,” he said.
“You’re here to be alone?”
“Yes, that was the idea.”
“That was the idea?”
That’s what the Curies were like, their reputation preceded them. He shouldn’t let it get to him. Kepler crossed his arms and smiled. All was quiet for a while. Marie was obviously waiting for him to say something, so that she could parrot it. But he wasn’t going to do her the favor, even though he wanted to know why they were there.
“You have to admit you could have gone almost anywhere. The Milky Way has 300 billion planets. We searched them all. Well, almost all. Almost none of them present any threat of company. And yet you chose K2-288Bb in particular, where Wang Zhenyi has constructed a base. You must have realized that the risk of meeting her here was quite high.
“Yes, I was quite lucky she wasn’t here.”
“No, Johannes,” said Pierre. “We enquired about you, even though it took a few megacycles. You have a shared past with Zhenyi. What did you want from her?”
“Nothing at all, I just wanted to be alone. She’s almost never home.”
“I don’t find that very plausible,” said Marie, “given the many alternatives where you would have been guaranteed solitude.”
“I don’t care,” he said.
That wasn’t true. He found the questions uncomfortable, and the Curies were intimidating him. But he couldn’t let it show. He’d chosen his destination deliberately – because he’d hoped to meet Zhenyi here. And he had still been hoping she would arrive someday, until now.
“We’re wondering why you’re not telling us the truth,” said Pierre. “Why are you really here?”
“I already told you.”
Marie sighed. “We’re not getting anywhere with this,” she said. “You don’t need to be afraid of us. We’re friends!”
Friends? He didn’t know anyone who was friends with the Curies. Gagarin and Armstrong maybe. Or Hahn and Meitner, the other physicist couple. How long had it been since he’d seen those two?
“I’m not afraid. I just don’t know what you want from me,” he said.
“We don’t want anything from you at all,” said Marie. “It’s about Zhenyi. We heard she’s undermining the Rescue Project.”
“And what’s that got to do with me?”
“You travel a few hundred light years to visit her?”
“Fine, I wanted to talk to her and couldn’t be bothered waiting hundreds of cycles for a reply.”
“You could have put yourself on ice like everyone else does,” said Pierre.
Kepler shook his head. It had in fact become common practice to sleep for long periods while waiting for a reply. If your correspondent
was 100 light years away, you could still speak completely normally with each other as long as you spent the 200 cycles of waiting time in a state of unconsciousness. But the time that was left to them was no longer endless. Since he had become aware of that fact, he had been trying to do without such methods. But in that case he’d rather not bother with conversations.
“That’s not for me,” he said. “I find it wasteful.”
“Fine,” said Pierre.
The Curies wandered up and down the room. It looked as though they were deep in thought. But in reality they were probably conversing with one another without him being able to hear.
Kepler stood up, went over to the fireplace and crouched in front of it. The ash really was warm. He ran his fingers through it. He really must take care of this body. If something happened to him like it did two days ago, there could be dire consequences in spite of the nano-fabricator. His index finger touched something cool, round. Kepler wanted to take it out and have a look, but he thought better of it. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence. The object must have been hidden in the wood. Had Zhenyi left him a message? As long as the Curies were still here, he couldn’t read it. He stood up again and wiped his ashy fingers on his pale cotton pants. The butler would scold him when he saw the stains. The pants had only been made yesterday.
Kepler sat down on what was still the only chair. The butler had cleared away the caskets, but not brought an extra chair. He didn’t particularly like the Curies either, it seemed. Kepler couldn’t blame him. They were brilliant scientists. They had developed the process that was supposed to lead to the rebooting of Sagittarius A* as a quasar. And now they were obsessing over such trivialities as his visit to Zhenyi? Something wasn’t right.
“So, what did you want to talk to Zhenyi about?” asked Marie.
“About my experiences on HR8799b. You can’t imagine how dense the asteroid belt is there,” he said.
“You know that we can effect an extraction of your externalized memories?” asked Pierre.
“But for that to happen, I have to be under suspicion of having committed a crime. You need a warrant from the judge AI on Terra. The Earth is far away. The request alone would take a few kilocycles, the answer even longer.”
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