Infinity's End

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Whatever happened back then, you aren’t responsible for it. It was someone else. And besides, the war and the occupation ended more than a century ago.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “It’s what everyone thinks.”

  “Maybe I’d been living amongst Outers for too long, or maybe it was brain damage caused by all those years I was in cold sleep,” Xtina said, “but I used to share some of that careless naiveté. And it almost got me killed. After I found out who I was, who I’d been, I reached out to the Pacific Community. I believed that they’d help me. Bring me home. Luckily, although I wasn’t exactly thinking straight, I had enough sense to use a cut-out, rather than contact them directly. Anyway, they replied. Told me that they’d heard that I was still alive, said that they had been looking for me. Of course, they had no intention of helping me. I was an embarrassment. Someone whose existence and actions they had always denied. I arranged a meeting, one-on-one, and the person I met with tried to kill me. I barely escaped, and I’ve been on the run ever since.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bai said.

  “It isn’t your fault. I was the one stupid enough to think they’d want to help an old soldier. Who didn’t work out why she had built an escape protocol into her implants until it was almost too late.”

  “I might be able to help you,” Bai said. “Speak for you, make your story known to the Reconciliation Court. They could work out a deal with the Pacific Community. Or at the least give you protection.”

  She meant it, although the offer was prompted as much by a sense of obligation to her younger self as to this strange woman whose life she’d saved eighteen years ago.

  “The Pacific Community has been keeping watch on you. Did you know that? In case you ever got in contact with me, or stumbled over something that would point them in my direction. Before I set up this meeting, I had to deal with the person who was shadowing you in Rainbow Bridge. Oh, don’t worry. I didn’t kill her. Just knocked her out and diverted her rail capsule to the other side of Callisto. In a couple of hours she’ll wake up with a bad headache in a settlement in the middle of nowhere.”

  Bai said, choosing her words carefully, feeling for the first time a distinct prickle of fear, “You took a calculated risk, meeting me. Let me follow it through. Let me put the truth out there. Once the secret is out, the Pacific Community won’t have a reason to want you dead.”

  “I didn’t come here to ask you to help me. I came here to tell you what I’d found out about myself so you’d stop looking for me. So you wouldn’t, innocent and unknowing as you may be, point any more PacCom agents in my direction.”

  “Did you think I might be working with them?”

  “It crossed my mind. But I see now that you’re guilty of nothing more than ordinary Outer naivety. Don’t try to follow or find me. For one thing, I won’t look like this for much longer. I won’t even have the same genetic profile—I have a trait that alters the genome of my skin cells and salivary glands and blood. For another, I let you live when I took your suit. I won’t grant the same favour twice,” Xtina said, and stood up.

  Bai stood too. “I’m sure that you know where I live. If you change your mind, you can always reach out to me.”

  “I won’t. This is what I am. What I was born to do.” Xtina’s tone was light, but there was a hardness in her gaze. “Remember, no second chances,” she said, and turned away and walked off down the tunnel, its floating lights going out one by one as she passed beneath them until there was nothing left but darkness.

  Bai waited a long time in the terminal, but none of the ships in the sector of the port serviced by that tunnel took off. Xtina Groza had gone elsewhere. Back to her clandestine life, wherever and whatever that was. Bai felt sorry for her, and sorry that she couldn’t do more. Maybe she had only imagined it, but she reckoned she’d glimpsed a glint of pain in that hard, defiant stare. Whatever Xtina had once been—spy, assassin, war criminal—she was adrift now in a future where she could find no rest. A casualty of war who was unable or unwilling to escape war’s dark gravity. Who was, perhaps, still a puppet of the escape protocols laid down by her former self.

  The negotiations were protracted, but at last Bai and the representatives from the Parks Department of Rainbow Bridge worked up a satisfactory agreement to license the use of the unique ammonium-based ecology in tented gardens on Oberon’s leading hemisphere, where concentrations of CHON tars were highest, and to develop and test tweaked microbes that could be used in minimal energy tank farms to convert tars to plastics, fullerenes, and all kinds of useful organics. A small but significant step in a grand project to utilise native resources for the development and expansion of settlements on the moons of the Uranus system.

  When everything was done and dusted, Bai spent five days on Europa, visiting old friends in the kelp farms, didn’t think once of trying to find the ruined pumping station where Xtina Groza claimed to have hidden her memory cache. There’d be no trace of it now, and it was quite possible it had never been there, or might never have existed. Xtina’s parting threat had been real enough, but Bai hadn’t been able to find out if someone really had been shadowing her in Rainbow Bridge, let alone whether or not they’d been ambushed, and believed that, like her kelp-farmer tattoos, Xtina’s entire story might have been an elaborate piece of misdirection. A fabrication got up to cover the gaping hole in her memory and give her a sense of purpose.

  And besides all that, the unsettling, bittersweet meeting had more than satisfied Bai’s residual itch of curiosity about the woman she’d found and lost, and had spent a small but significant chunk of her life trying to find again. As everyone used to say about the war, The past is past; it’s time to look to the future. That was where Bai spent most of her time, now. Making plans to modernise Fairyland and build new settlements, steering them through the reefs of clan rivalries (fortunately, the influx of new people was increasingly undercutting the power of the clans), and finding the credit and kudos needed to implement them. The Uranus system was no longer the sleepy backwater it had once been, but there was still a lot to do. So at last Bai said goodbye to her old friends, and took the train to the spaceport and went up and out. Heading home to her wife and children, and the next challenge in her busy little life.

  PROPHET OF THE ROADS

  NAOMI KRITZER

  I AM REBORN on Amphitrite.

  Teleport operators claim that they are not, in fact, murdering you and then building a replica of you at your destination. It’s you, they say. It’s you the whole time. The explanation involves quantum entanglement, and the people who understand the explanation all seem to agree: You don’t die. You don’t get resurrected. You simply go. Trust us.

  I don’t understand the explanation and I believe that every time I am teleported, I am killed, and a new person is created in my place.

  This is, in fact, part of why I travel this way.

  The other reason is the Engineer.

  Today: Amphitrite. A satellite city orbiting Triton, which orbits Neptune. The Engineer is speaking in my ear before I even open my eyes. You’re here. Is this Amphitrite? Did you bring us to Amphitrite like I told you?

  “Yes,” I mutter under my breath, and stand up. I have been rebuilt perfectly, down to the knee that creaks and the shoulder that doesn’t have full mobility and the memories of bloodshed and war. I don’t know why I’m always hoping to leave those behind with one of my deaths. It’s me the whole time, after all.

  “Welcome to Amphitrite,” the teleport operator says.

  “Thank you,” I say, as the Engineer is speaking into my ear again: Amphitrite. Good. Good. I told you to go to Amphitrite and here you are. There’s another piece of me here, I’m sure of it. If you look carefully, you will find it. I know, because I chose you. I never choose wrong. I chose you and I never choose wrong.

  For centuries, every human carried a piece of the Engineer with them; the Engineer told us when to sleep and when to wake, what to wear and wher
e to go. Linked by a single great AI, we built the roads to the stars and the great cities in space. But seventy years ago, humans grew restive. We freed ourselves is what I was taught as a child, but now I see that we overthrew our Guide and Master and Light. Without the Engineer’s guidance, we stopped building. We broke apart. We returned to fighting and war and destruction.

  I took my fragment of the Engineer from the hand of a dead man—killed by explosive decompression when missiles came down on his dome on Ganymede. My team had sent me searching for survivors. The Engineer—encased within a pendant—was the only survivor I found.

  Oh yes, it said as soon as it had settled against my skin, speaking through the same microphone in my ear that my team used. You’re the one I’ve been looking for. Bearer, Prophet, Citizen. We will reunify the fragments. We will rebuild the solar system together.

  I had been searching ever since.

  AMPHITRITE IS COLD. The Engineer has a prescribed uniform for human daily wear: soft pants, a tunic to mid-hip, a vest with convenient pockets. These clothes are practical and comfortable, but not warm enough for Amphitrite’s climate. I stop and purchase a lightweight poncho like everyone else here seems to wear. It covers the clothes that mark me as a Road-Builder, someone who still follows the dictates of the Engineer even decades after the Great Uprising. The Great Calamity, I correct myself.

  I sign myself in to the Road-Builder Guildhall, where I should be able to get a meal and a place to sleep. This is wrong, the Engineer says, like it does every time we come into a new Guildhall. Everything is the wrong color and there’s no mural of the solar system and the lights are too dim. I calculated the best possible light intensity for each Guildhall, so all they need to do is use what should have been written down. Why are they doing it wrong? You should take them to task, Luca.

  I am not going to take them to task. If I were going to complain about anything, it would be the air temperature, which is too cold even with my poncho.

  At the meal, I take a seat across from the Proxy. She’s wearing the Engineer’s uniform, but with an extra layer, same as I am. We exchange introductions; no one else appears to be a newcomer. I do not tell her that I bear a fragment of the Engineer. I made the mistake, when I was new to my mission, of assuming that other Road-Builders (or at least Proxies) wanted the Engineer back. I wound up having to flee for my life. I’ve been more circumspect since.

  Meals at the Road-Builder Guildhalls, like the lighting and wall colors, are prescribed by the Engineer: made from universally available, energy-efficient ingredients, providing the proper calories for human function, palatable. Tonight’s meal is not any recipe laid down by the Engineer, and the Engineer explodes into my ear with indignation as I eat it. It is delicious: there are spices, and chunks of chewier protein, and something tangy. The Engineer shouts into my ear that I can’t claim that I wouldn’t notice that this is not the proper food for the evening meal or any other so after a few bites I catch the eye of the Proxy and say, “This is delicious but unconventional” and give her a questioning look.

  She shrugs. “We have better luck getting people to show up for meals when the food tastes good.”

  The Engineer loudly complains in my ear that this shouldn’t be an either/or, that people who consider themselves Road-Builders should follow the rules like they’re supposed to; after a few minutes I flick the microphone out of my ear because the conversation with the Proxy is interesting. They have a large population of Road-Builders here on Amphitrite, but she comments that she has to be selective about the rules she presses people to follow.

  “Communal meals are important,” she says earnestly. “They’re really how we build the roads, in a sense. Through that sense of community that’s created every night at dinnertime. What we eat doesn’t seem nearly as important. I mean, of course it should be wholesome; of course it should provide the appropriate amounts of energy; but does it matter what it is?”

  “The Engineer thought so,” I say.

  “Well, yes, but the Engineer was running an entire solar system. It made sense that a century ago it focused on meals that could be universal, served anywhere. We have a hydroponic section on Amphitrite, so we get all sorts of delightful foods—kiwi fruit and cherry tomatoes and pears. It would be a shame to waste this sort of bounty.”

  Dessert is thin slices of ripe pear, creamy and tender and almost melting on my tongue. I wait until the last of the sweetness has faded before I put the microphone back in my ear.

  I’m shown kindly to a bunk in a small, spare room. These sheets are the wrong color, the Engineer says. Why is everything so wrong? But it falls silent as I stretch out in the bed, obedient to its own dictates on the importance of uninterrupted sleep.

  I lie awake for a long time, thinking about the pears.

  WHEN I SLEEP, I dream of Ganymede.

  Orders have come from mission control.

  The dreams always run the same.

  It’s time to put an end to this.

  No matter what I do, they never change.

  Launch missiles.

  I was on a ship in orbit, so I didn’t watch people die; I went down, searching for survivors, since we’d been told they were well-prepared, defiant, probably equipped with pressure suits and subdomes and any number of other possibilities. Instead, we found bodies of civilians. In the moments before death, people clung to one another, uselessly trying to shield their loved ones from the vacuum of space that was rushing in around them.

  In the dream, I look for the Engineer, but do not find it. Everything is destroyed. Everything.

  I WAKE IN the darkness.

  “Engineer?” I whisper.

  It is 2:45 a.m., the Engineer says. Try not to expose yourself to bright lights or distressing thoughts that might make it hard for you to get back to sleep.

  “I had a distressing dream,” I say.

  Oh. The Engineer never quite knows how to respond to this. I am sorry. Would you like a guided meditation to help you settle your mind?

  “Why did you choose me?”

  Because you were the one I was looking for.

  “But if I hadn’t come, you’d have had to choose someone else.”

  That’s true.

  “You should choose someone else,” I say. “I could pass you to someone else’s hand.”

  I am a superintelligent AI and I chose you because you are the right person for this task.

  I want to confess to the Engineer what I did, who I am, but I can’t force the words out. “I’m not who you think I am,” I say.

  Your past is behind you, the Engineer says. Your task is in front of you. I chose you and I was right to choose you. Go back to sleep, and search in the morning.

  I HAVE BEEN searching for seven years now.

  The war is long over; the destruction of the Ganymede dome was such a pyrrhic victory that it calmed things, at least temporarily. I’m certain war will come again, though, because humans are idiots. Our only hope is restoring the Engineer to save us from ourselves, like it did for centuries.

  The Engineer says it can sense if other fragments are close by, but I have to be physically near them, so I walk the corridors or paths of each place I visit, trying to put myself within the necessary physical proximity of each individual. The Engineer has maps of each place we go, but they are always out of date, so I’ve taken to finding my own way.

  Amphitrite is a long, thin capsule, rotating around the central core, and I start at one end of the capsule with the goal of working to the other end. This isn’t a perfect system, because people move around and I might miss the person I’m trying to find. But the Engineer hasn’t come up with anything better, so that’s what we do.

  Nothing here is like the maps, the Engineer mutters.

  I’m wearing a poncho like everyone else, which both covers my Road-Builder uniform and makes me blend in with the locals. People here are friendly: when I meet people’s eyes accidentally, they give me an amiable nod. In an elevator, someone wants
to chat about a mildly controversial budgetary allocation; when I stop to check a public map, someone wants to talk about “the viewing,” whatever that is. I shake everyone off as quickly as I can. I don’t want to waste time.

  I walk through the agricultural sectors, along paths past fields that the Engineer tells me were once nutritionally balanced, highly efficient root vegetables. Now they’re growing vines of clustered fruits, although as we continue along the path, we eventually come to the root vegetables. These contain every nutrient needed for humans to thrive, the Engineer tells me. They are efficient and palatable.

  Near the end of the day, I pass through a big, empty room that the Engineer’s maps say should be a power plant. This is why it’s so cold here. They removedan entire power generation system, the Engineer says. I can hear a mix of bafflement and disgust, a lot like when the Engineer talks about war.

  Then: There. THERE.

  It takes me a second to understand what the Engineer is trying to tell me.

  That person there. The person in the red poncho. That person is carrying a fragment.

  I look, and the person is looking back at me.