Godlike Machines

by Jonathan Strahan [Editor]

  He winked at me. “Absolutely sure of that, comrade?”

  I wiped the sleeve of my load-suit against the portal glass to clear the condensation. From around the curve of the ship there was a puff of silvery brightness as the pyrotechnic docking latches released their hold on the Progress. In the same instant I heard a faraway thud and felt the fabric of the ship lurch with the recoil.

  “Confirm separation,” Yakov reported, calling from another porthole. “Looks like a clean birth to me, boys and girls.”

  Galenka was webbed into a hammock at the Progress workstation, one hand on a joystick and the other tapping a keyboard. The screens before her were alive with camera views, from both the Tereshkova and the little robot that had just detached from it.

  “Beginning thruster translation,” she said, touching keys. “You should see her in a few seconds, Dimitri.”

  The Progress drifted over my horizon, a pea-green shuttlecock with CCCP stenciled down the side in red letters. Very slowly it pulled away from the Tereshkova and tipped around on two axes, pointing its nose at the forbidding darkness of the Matryoshka. “Looking good,” I said, inspecting every visible inch of the spacecraft for signs of damage. “No impacts that I can see. Looks as good as the day they wheeled her out of the clean room.”

  “Stirring hydrazine tanks,” Galenka said. “Let’s see if she holds, shall we?”

  “Still there,” I reported, when the Progress had failed to blow itself apart. “Looks like we have a viable spacecraft. Shall I break out the vodka?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves—no use going in if we’re blind. Beginning camera and waldo deployment—this’ll be the real test.”

  Our little envoy looked like a cross between a spaceship and a deep-sea submersible robot, the kind they use to explore shipwrecks and pull missiles out of sunken submarines. Arms and sensors and cameras had been bolted onto the front, ruining whatever vague aerodynamics the Progress might have had. Now the equipment—stowed since launch—was slowly deploying, like a flower opening to the sun. Galenka pushed aside the joystick and tugged down a set of waldo controls, slipping her fingers into the heavy, sensor-laden gloves and sleeves. Out in space, the Progress’s mechanical arms and hands echoed her gestures. It looked good to me but Galenka still frowned and made some small adjustments to the settings. Ever the perfectionist, I thought. More checkout tests followed until she signified grudging satisfaction.

  “Camera assembly three is a little stiff—I wouldn’t be surprised if it seizes on us mid-mission. Haptic feedback on arm two is delayed just enough to throw me off. We’ve lost a row of pixels on the mid infrared array-probably a bad cosmic ray strike. I’m already reading an event overflow in one of the memory buffers, and we haven’t even started logging data.”

  “But you’re happy to continue?” I asked.

  “Unless we brought a second Progress no one told me about, we’re stuck with this one.”

  “It’s nothing we can repair,” Yakov said. “So we may as well live with it. Even if we went out in the suits, we don’t have the tools to fix those instruments.”

  “I don’t need that spelled out,” Galenka said, just barely keeping a lid on her temper.

  Yakov was starting to needle both of us. The Matryoshka was getting to him in a way it wasn’t yet getting to Galenka, or me for that matter. He’d started coming out with some very odd statements. The joke of his, that we were still back in Star City, that all of this was an elaborate simulation, a preparation for the mission to come-even down to the impossible-to-fake weightlessness-was beginning to wear thin.

  What bothered me was that I wasn’t even sure he was joking anymore.

  People cracked in space. It was part of the job. I just hadn’t expected it to happen to one of us, so soon in the mission. We hadn’t even touched the Matryoshka yet. What was going to happen when the Progress reached the secret layers beneath Shell 3?

  I tried not to think about it.

  “What’s your approach speed?” I asked, looming behind Galenka while she worked the controls.

  “Two meters per second, on the nail.”

  “A little on the fast side, aren’t we?”

  Galenka touched a hand over the mike, so Baikonur wouldn’t hear what she had to say next. “You flying this thing, or me, comrade?”

  “You are, definitely.” I scratched at chin stubble. “It’s just that I thought we were going to keep it below one meter a second, all the way in.”

  “You want to sit around for thirty hours, be my guest.”

  “I wouldn’t be the one doing the sitting.”

  “This is well within acceptable limits. We’ll make up speed in the gaps and slow down when we hit anything knotty. Trust me on this, all right?”

  “You’re the pilot.”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  She un-cupped the microphone. “Holding approach speed, Baikonur. Progress systems stable. One hundred meters into Shell 1. Predictive impact model still holding. No change in the status of the Matryoshka or the surrounding vacuum.”

  On the screen, wireframe graphics traced the vast right-angled shapes of radar-illuminated obstacles-iceberg or battle-cruiser sized slabs of inscrutably dark free-flying machinery, between which the Progress was obliged to navigate a path, avoiding not only the obstacles but the invisible threads of razor-thin force binding them together. Shell 1 was not a solid sphere, but a swarm of deadly obstacles and tripwires.

  During the second apparition, the Americans had sent one of their robot probes straight through one of those field threads. It had gone instantly silent, suggesting that it had suffered a fatal or damaging collision. Years later, deep space radar had picked it up again, drifting powerless on a sun-circling orbit. A manned expedition (one of the last the Americans ever managed) was sent out to recover it and bring it back to Earth for inspection.

  Yet when the astronauts got hold of part of the probe, an entire half of it drifted silently away from the other, separating along a mathematically perfect plane of bisection. The astronauts stared in mute incomprehension at the sliced-through interior of the robot, its tight-packed, labyrinthine innards gleaming back at them with the polish of chrome. The robot must have been cut in two as it passed through the Matryoshka, but so cleanly that the two parts had continued moving on exactly the same trajectory, until this moment.

  Although it was only the robot we were sending in, with the Tereshkova parked at a safe distance, I still shuddered to think what those lines of force could do to metal and ceramic, to flesh and bone. The predictive model traced the vectors of the field lines and offered solutions for safe passage, but, try as I might, I couldn’t share Galenka’s unflappable faith in the power of algorithm and computer speed.

  Still, like she said, she was the pilot. This was her turf and I was well advised not to trample on it. I’d have felt exactly the same way if she had dared tell me how to manage the Tereshkova’s data acquisition and transmission systems.

  Following a plan that had been argued over for months back on Earth, it had been agreed to attempt sample collection at each stage of the Progress’s journey. The predictive model gave us confidence that the robot could get close to one of the free-flying obstacles without being sliced by the field lines. Dropping the Progress’s speed to less than a meter per second, Galenka brought it within contact range of a particular lump of alien machinery and extended the arms and analysis tools to their full extent. We had no idea what the obstacles were made of, but—thanks to a Chinese probe that had gone off-course during the second apparition—we did know that the outer integument was surprisingly brittle. The probe had destroyed itself utterly in its high-velocity collision, but not before chipping off vast chunks of alien material. To our delight, early surveys of the Matryoshka on its third return had shown that the impacted obstacle had not repaired itself.

  The Progress anchored itself by firing sticky-tipped guy-lines onto the obstacle. Galenka used hammers, cutting devices a
nd claws to pick away at the scabbed edge of the impact point. Pieces of integument flaked away easily-had we been out there in our EVA suits, we could have ripped them out by hand. Some of them were coal-sized, some were as large as engine blocks. Galenka loaded up a third of the Progress’s cargo space before deeming the haul sufficient. She wanted room for more samples when she got further in.

  “Want to bring her back, unload and return?” I asked. The plan had been to make multiple forays into the Matryoshka, until we’d exhausted our hydrazine reserves.

  “Not with the systems as screwed as they are. We lose camera rotation, or blow some more memory, we’re blind. Maybe we’ll get three or four missions out of the robot, but right now I’m assuming this is the last one. I’d like to go deeper, at least until we have a full hold.”

  “You want to consult with Baikonur?”

  “We have discretion here, Dimitri. Timelag’s too great to go crying to mummy every time we have a decision to make.” She withdrew her hands from the waldo controls and flexed her fingers. “I’m taking her further in, while we still have a ship that works.”

  “I’m fine with that.”

  “Good,” she said, massively indifferent to whether I was “fine” with it or not. Then, “Where’s Yakov right now, by the way?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “One of us needs to keep an eye on him, Dimitri. Not happy with that guy. I think he’s on the edge.”

  “We’re all on the edge. It’s called being in space.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Keep an eye on him, yes. I will.”

  At fifteen kilometers, the Progress cleared Shell 1 and passed into a volume of open space relatively devoid of moving obstacles or field lines. Galenka notched up the speed, until the Progress was falling inwards at a kilometer every ten seconds. There was nothing here to sample or analyse. “Normal vacuum in Gap 1,” she murmured. “Or at least what the robot reads as normal. The ambient physics hasn’t changed too much.”

  Ever since the first apparition, it had been known—or at least suspected—that the Matryoshka was not just a mysteriously layered artifact drifting through space. In some way that we didn’t yet understand, the object distorted the very physics of the spacetime in which it was floating. The effects were almost too subtle to measure at the distance of the Tereshkova, but they became more severe the closer any probes got to the middle. Fundamental constants stopped being fundamental. The speed of light varied. Planck’s constant deviated from the figure in textbooks. So did the weak mixing angle, the fine-structure constant, Newton’s constant. None of this could be explained under any existing theory of physics, but it was all disturbing. It was as if the Matryoshka was dragging a chunk of another universe around with it. Perhaps it had been designed that way, or perhaps the altered spacetime was a kind of lingering contamination, a side-effect of worm-hole travel.

  Of course, we didn’t know for sure that the Matryoshka had come through a wormhole. That was just an educated guess papered over the vast, yawning chasm of our ignorance. All we knew for sure was that it had appeared, accompanied by a flash of energy, in the middle of the solar system.

  I remembered that day very well. November the sixth, 2015. My twentieth birthday, to the day. Twenty four years later—two of the Matryoshka’s looping, twelve year elliptical orbits around the Sun—and here I was, staring the thing in the face, as if my whole adult life had been an arrow pointing to this moment.

  Maybe it had.

  I was born in 1995, in Klushino. It’s a small place near Smolensk. It wouldn’t have any claim to fame except Klushino is the place where Yuri Gagarin was born. I knew that name almost before I knew any other. My father told me about him; how he had been the first man in space, his unassuming modesty, how he became a deputy of the Supreme Soviet, a hero for all the world, how he had died when his training jet crashed into trees. My father told me that it was a custom for all cosmonauts to visit Gagarin’s office before a mission, to see the clock on the wall stopped at the moment of his death. Years later, I paid my own respects in the office.

  The thing I remember most of all about my father, though, is holding me on his shoulders when I was five, taking me out into a cold winter evening to watch our Mir space station arc across the twilight sky. I reached out to grasp it and he held me higher, as if that might make a difference.

  “Do you want to go up there sometime, Dimitri?”

  “Do you have to be big?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Big and brave and strong. But you’ll do, one day.”

  “And if I died would they stop the clock in my office as well?”

  “You won’t die,” my father said. Even though it was cold he had his shirt sleeves rolled up, his hair scratching against my skin.

  “But if I did.”

  “Of course they would. Just like Comrade Gagarin. And they’d make a hero of you as well.”

  I take the elevator to the ninth floor of Nesha Petrova’s apartment building The doors open to a chill wind, howling in from the flat farmland beyond the city. The landing is open to the elements, only a low railing along one side. When I arrive at Nesha’s apartment, half way along the landing, the door is ajar. Nesha—for it can only be Nesha—is waiting in the gap, bony, long-nailed fingers curling around the edge of the door. I see half her face—her right eye, prematurely wrinkled skin, a wisp of gray hair. She looks much smaller, much older and frailer, than I ever dared to imagine.

  “Whatever you have to show me, show me and go.”

  “I’d really like to talk to you first.” I hold up my gloveless, numb-fingered hands. “Everything I told you is true. I escaped from the psychiatric facility a few hours ago, and by now they’ll be looking for me.”

  “Then you should go now.”

  “I was inside the Matryoshka, Nesha. Don’t you want to hear what happened to me?”

  She opens the door a tiny bit more, showing me more of her face. She’s old now but the younger Nesha hasn’t been completely erased. I can still see the strong and determined women who stood by her beliefs, even when the state decided those beliefs were contrary to the official truth.

  “I heard the rumours. They say you went insane.”

  I give an easy shrug. “I did, on the way home. It’s the only thing that saved me. If I hadn’t gone crazy, I wouldn’t be standing here now.”

  “You said there was something I had to know.”

  “Give me a little of your time, then I’ll be gone. That’s my promise to you.”

  Nesha looks back over her shoulder. She’s wearing a knitted shawl of indeterminate color. “It isn’t much warmer in here. When you called, I hoped you’d come to fix the central heating.” She pauses for a moment, mind working, then adds, “I can give you something to drink, and maybe something better to wear. I still have some of my husband’s old clothes—someone may as well get some use from them.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “You shouldn’t have come to see me. No good will come of it, for either us.”

  “You might say the damage is already done.”

  She lets me inside. Nesha might consider her apartment cold, but it’s a furnace to me. After the wards and cubicles of the facility, it’s bordering on the luxurious. There are a couple of items of old furniture, threadbare but otherwise serviceable. There’s a low coffee table with faded plastic flowers in a vase. There are pictures on the walls, save for the part that’s been painted over with television. It’s beginning to flake off in the corners, so it won’t be too long before someone comes along to redo it.

  “I can’t turn it off,” Nesha says, as if I’ve already judged her. “You can scrape it away, but they just come and paint it on again. They take more care of that than they do the heating. And they don’t like it if they think you’d done it deliberately, or tried to hide the television behind pictures.”

  I remember the incessant televisions in the facility; the various strategies that the patients evolved to block
them out or muffle the sound. “I understand. You don’t have to make allowances.”

  “I don’t like the world we live in. I’m old enough to remember when it was different.” Still standing up, she waves a hand dismissively, shooing away the memories of better times. “Anyway, I don’t hear so well these days. It’s a blessing, I suppose.”

  “Except it doesn’t feel like one.” I point to one of the threadbare chairs. “May I sit down?”

  “Do what you like.”

  I ease my aching bones into the chair. My damp clothes cling to me.

  Nesha looks at me with something close to pity.

  “Are you really the cosmonaut?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can make some tea.”

  “Please. Anything hot.”

  I watch her amble into the adjoining kitchen. Her clothes are still those of her early middle age, with allowance for infirmity and the cold. She wears old-looking jeans, several layers of jumpers, a scarf and the drab colored shawl. Even though we’re indoors she wears big fur boots. The clothes give her an illusion of bulk, but I can tell how thin she really is. Like a bird with a lot of puffed-up plumage, hiding delicate bones. There’s also something darting, nervous, and birdlike about the way she negotiates the claustrophobic angles of her apartment. I hear the clatter of a kettle, the squeak of a tap, a half-hearted dribble of water, then she returns.

  “It’ll take a while.”

  “Everything does, these days. When I was younger, old people used to complain about the world getting faster and faster, leaving them behind. That isn’t how it seems to you and I. We’ve left the world behind—we’ve kept up, but it hasn’t.”

  “How old are you?” she asks.

  “Fifty one.”

  “Not what I’d call old. I have twenty years on you.” But her eyes measure me and I know what she’s thinking. I look older, beyond any doubt. The mission took its toll on me, but so did the facility. There were times when I looked in the mirror with a jolt of non-recognition, a stranger’s face staring back at me. “Something bad happened to you out there, didn’t it,” she said.