Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘I’ve cut you off, Doctor. Do the same to me if you wish, but for now I’m going to speak and you don’t get to interrupt me.’

  She was trying to override him, hunting through the control computer’s systems to find what he had done, but he had locked her out elegantly and selectively. There were whole areas of the facility’s systems that just did not appear on her mental schematic, and when she quizzed the computer about them, it refused to acknowledge their existence. None of them was mission critical – not the Barrel, not the Flask, not even the Sentry Pod – therefore none were the systems she had been obsessively checking every day.

  Not mission critical, perhaps, but facility critical.

  ‘He’s disabled the reactor safeties,’ Mercian reported. ‘What’s going on? Why’s he in the engine core at all?’ Alarm but not outright panic, which was a good finger in the air for the mood of the crew all around.

  He is in the engine core because his death will be instant and total and therefore probably painless, Kern surmised. She was already moving, to the surprise of the others. She was heading up, climbing into the access shaft that led to the slender central pylon of the station, heading away from the outer floor that remained ‘down’ only so long as she was close to it; climbing up out of that spurious gravity well towards the long needle they all revolved around. There was a flurry of increasingly concerned messages. Voices called out at her heels. Some of them would follow her, she knew.

  Sering was continuing blithely: ‘This is not even the beginning, Doctor Kern.’ His tone was relentlessly deferential even in rebellion. ‘Back home it will have already started. Back home it is probably already over. In another few years, maybe, you’ll hear that Earth and our future have been taken back for the humans. No uplifted monkeys, Doctor Kern. No godlike computers. No freakshows of the human form. We’ll have the universe to ourselves, as we were intended to – as was always our destiny. On all the colonies, in the solar system and out, our agents will have made their move. We will have taken power – with the consent of the majority, you understand, Doctor Kern.’

  And she was lighter and lighter, hauling herself towards an ‘up’ that was becoming an ‘in’. She knew she should be cursing Sering, but what was the point if he would never hear her?

  It was not such a long way to the weightlessness of the needle’s hollow interior. She had her choice then: either towards the engine core, where Sering had no doubt taken steps to ensure that he would not be disturbed; or away. Away, in a very final sense.

  She could override anything Sering had done. She had full confidence in the superiority of her abilities. It would take time, though. If she cast herself that way down the needle, towards Sering and his traps and locked barriers, then time would be something she would not have the benefit of.

  ‘And if the powers-that-be refuse us, Doctor Kern,’ that hateful voice continued in her ear, ‘then we will fight. If we must wrest mankind’s destiny back by force, then we shall.’

  She barely took in what he was saying, but a cold sense of fear was creeping into her mind – not from the danger to her and the Brin 2, but what he was saying about Earth and the colonies. A war? Impossible. Not even the NUNs . . . But it was true there had been some incidents – assassinations, riots, bombs. The whole of Europa Base had been compromised. The NUNs were spitting into the inevitable storm of manifest destiny, though. She had always believed that. Such outbursts represented the last throes of humanity’s under-evolvers.

  She was now heading the other way, distancing herself from the engine core as though the Brin had enough space within it for her to escape the coming blast. She was utterly rational, however. She knew exactly where she was going.

  Ahead of her was the circular portal to the Sentry Pod. Only on seeing it did she realize that some part of her mind – the part she always relied on to finesse the more complex calculations – had already fully understood the current situation and discerned the one slim-but-possible way out.

  This was where Sering was supposed to be. This was the slow boat to the future that he – in a sane timeline – would have been piloting. Now she ordered the door to open, relieved to discover that this – the one piece of equipment that was actually his particular business – seemed to have remained free of Sering’s meddling.

  The first explosion came, and she thought it was the last one. The Brin creaked and lurched around her, but the engine core remained stable – as evidenced by the fact that she herself had not been disintegrated. She tuned back into the wild whirl of frantic messaging between the crew. Sering had rigged the escape pods. He didn’t want anyone avoiding the fate he had decreed for himself. Had he somehow forgotten the Sentry Pod?

  The detonating pods would push the Brin 2 out of position, drifting either towards the planet or off into space. She had to get clear.

  The door opened at her command, and she had the Sentry hub run a diagnostic on the release mechanism. There was so little space inside, just the cold-sleep coffin – don’t think of it as a coffin! – and the termini of its associated systems.

  The hub was querying her – she was not the right person, nor was she wearing the proper gear for prolonged cold sleep. But I don’t intend to be here for centuries, just long enough to ride it out. She swiftly overrode its quibbles, and by that time the diagnostics had pinpointed Sering’s tampering, or rather identified, by process of elimination, those parts of the release process that he had erased from its direct notice.

  Sounds from outside suggested that the best course of action was to order the door closed, and then lock the systems so that nobody from outside could intrude on her.

  She climbed into the cold-sleep tank, and around that time the banging started; those others of the crew who had come to the same realization as her, but slightly later. She blocked out their messaging. She blocked out Sering too, who was obviously not going to tell her anything useful now. It was better if she didn’t have to share her head with anyone except the hub control systems.

  She had no idea how much time she had, but she worked with the trademark balance of speed and care that had got her where she was now. Got me leading the Brin 2 facility and got me here in the Sentry Pod. What a clever, doomed monkey I am. The muffled banging was more insistent, but the pod only had room for one. Her heart had always been hard, but she found that she had to harden it still further, and not think of all those names and faces, her loyal colleagues, that she and Sering between them were condemning to an explosive end.

  Which I myself have not yet escaped, she reminded herself. And then she had it: a work-around jury-rigged release path that avoided Sering’s ghost systems. Would it work? She had no opportunity for a dry run, nor had she any other options. Nor, she suspected, any time.

  Release, she ordered the hub, and then shouted down all of the different ways it was programmed to ask ‘Are you sure?’, until she felt the movement of mechanisms around her.

  Then it wanted her to go into cold sleep immediately, as had been the plan, but she made it wait. If the captain was not going down with her ship, she would at least watch its demise from a distance. And how much distance would that need?

  There were, by then, several thousand messages clamouring for her attention. Every member of the crew wanted to talk to her, but she had nothing to say to any of them.

  The Sentry Pod had no windows either. Had she wanted, it could have shown her a HUD display of the rapidly receding Brin 2, as her little capsule of life fell into its prearranged orbit.

  Now she returned to the Brin’s systems, her internal comms boosted by the Sentry hub, and instructed it, Launch the Barrel.

  She wondered if it was just poor timing, but in retrospect that had probably been Sering’s first and more carefully performed task – subtle enough to slip by in all her checks, because of course the actual mechanical release for Flask and Barrel was virtually beneath her notice. On the shoulders of others, she had said, but she had not stopped to think about those beneath her in
that pyramid of achievement. Even the lowliest of them had to agree to bear her weight, or all of it would come falling down.

  She saw the flare not even in her mind’s eye, but through the brief flower of damage reports from the Brin 2’s computers, as all of her colleagues and her facility, and Sering the traitor, and all of her work became abruptly no more than a rapidly disassociating cloud of fragments, a ghost-breath of dissipating atmosphere, with some unrecognizable organic remains.

  Correct course and stabilize. She had been expecting a shockwave, but the Sentry Pod was already far enough away, and the Brin 2’s energy and matter were so miniscule, compared to the distances involved, that barely any adjustment was required to ensure the Sentry Pod remained within its programmed orbit.

  Show me. She braced herself for the image, but, really, at this remove it seemed almost nothing. A flash; a tiny burned boat of all her ideas and friends.

  In the final analysis it had all been nothing more than a barrel of over-evolved monkeys, after all. From this distance, against the vast and heedless backdrop of Everything Else, it was hard to say why any of it had ever mattered at all.

  Distress beacon, she ordered. Because they would need to know, on Earth, what had happened. They had to know that they must come and collect her, wake her like Sleeping Beauty. After all, she was Doctor Kern. She was the future of the human race, right here. They needed her.

  Twenty long years for her signal to reach Earth. Far more than that for the rescue to come back, even with the best fusion engines employed to accelerate to three-quarter light speed. But her frail body would survive that long in cold sleep – and more than that.

  Some hours later, she saw the end of it: she saw the Barrel hit atmosphere.

  It was not on the planned trajectory, the conflagration of the Brin 2 having sent it off on a tangent so that it narrowly avoided being hurled forever into empty space. Its cargo would not care, in the long run. The Barrel burned, streaking like a meteor through the atmosphere of the green world. Somehow the thought of the insensate terror that its primate occupants must be going through, as they died in ignorance by fear and burning, touched her more than the death of her fellow humans. And wouldn’t Sering claim that as evidence that he was right?

  From force of habit, a redundant professional thoroughness, she located the Flask, watching as the smaller canister fell through the atmosphere at a gentler angle, delivering its viral cargo to a world devoid of the simians it was intended for.

  We can always get more monkeys. That was a curious mantra, but it made her feel better. The uplift virus would last for millennia. The project would survive the treachery and death of its creators. She herself would ensure it.

  Listen for a change in radio signals. Wake me when you hear it, she instructed.

  The pod computer was not happy about that. It required more exacting parameters. Kern thought over all the developments back home she might want to be appraised of. Listing them all was tantamount to trying to predict the future.

  Then give me options.

  Her HUD streamed with possibilities. The pod computer was a sophisticated piece of engineering, complex enough that it could feign sentience, if not quite own to it.

  Upload facility, she noted. It was not the most pleasant thought in the world, but was she not always saying how much easier life would be if she could arrange everything herself? The pod could upload an image of her consciousness into itself. Albeit an imperfect copy, it would form a Kern-computer composite that would be able to react to external events in a simulation of her own best judgement. She scanned through the caveats and notes – more cutting-edge technology that they were due to have pioneered. Over time it was predicted that the AI network would further incorporate the uploaded Kern so that the composite would be able to make finer and finer distinctions. Potentially the end result would be something smarter and more capable than the simple sum total of human and machine combined.

  Do it, she instructed, lying back and waiting for the pod to begin scanning her brain. Just let them be quick with the rescue party.

  1.2 BRAVE LITTLE HUNTRESS

  She is Portia, and she is hunting.

  She is eight millimetres long but she is a tiger within her tiny world, fierce and cunning. Like all spiders, she has a body of two parts. Her small abdomen holds her book-lungs and the bulk of her gut. Her head-body is dominated by two huge eyes facing forwards for perfect binocular vision, beneath a pair of tiny tufts that crown her like horns. She is fuzzy with hair in broken patterns of brown and black. To predators, she looks more dead leaf than live prey.

  She waits. Below her formidable eyes her fangs are flanked by limb-like mouthparts: her palps, coloured a startling white like a quivering moustache. Science has named her Portia labiata, just another unassuming species of jumping spider.

  Her attention is fixed on another spider at home in its web. This is Scytodes pallida, longer-limbed and hunchbacked and able to spit toxic webbing. Scytodes specializes in catching and eating jumping spiders like Portia.

  Portia specializes in eating spider-eating spiders, most of whom are larger and stronger than she.

  Her eyes are remarkable. The visual acuity of a primate peers out from those pinhead-sized discs and the flexible chambers behind them, piecing together the world around her.

  Portia has no thoughts. Her sixty thousand neurons barely form a brain, contrasted with a human’s one hundred billion. But something goes on in that tiny knot of tissue. She has already recognized her enemy, and knows its spit will make any frontal assault fatal. She has been playing with the edge of the Scytodes’s web, sending tactile lies to it of varying shades to see if it can be lured out. The target has twitched once or twice, but it will not be deceived.

  This is what a few tens of thousands of neurons can do: Portia has tried and failed, variation after variation, homing in on those that evinced the most response, and now she will go about things differently.

  Her keen eyes have been examining the surroundings of the web, the branches and twigs that hang over and below it. Somewhere in her little knot of neurons a three-dimensional map has been built up from her meticulous scrutiny, and she has plotted a painstaking course to where she may come at the Scytodes from above, like a minute assassin. The approach is not perfect, but it is the best the environment will allow, and her scrap of brain has worked all this out as a theoretical exercise ahead of time. The planned approach will take her out of sight of her prey for much of the journey, but even when her prey is beyond view, it will remain in her tiny mind.

  If her prey was something other than Scytodes, then she would have different tactics – or would experiment until something worked. It usually does.

  Portia’s ancestors have been making these calculations and decisions for millennia, each generation fractionally more accomplished because the best hunters are the ones that eat well and lay more eggs.

  So far, so natural, and Portia is just about to set off on her quest when movement attracts her gaze.

  Another of her species has arrived, a male. He has also been studying the Scytodes, but now his acute eyes are locked on her.

  Past individuals of her species might have decided that the little male was a safer lunch than the Scytodes, and made plans accordingly, but now something changes. The presence of the male speaks to her. It is a complex new experience. The crouching figure there at the far side of the Scytodes’s web is not just prey/mate/irrelevant. There is an invisible connection strung between them. She does not quite grasp that he is something like her, but her formidable ability to calculate strategies has gained a new dimension. A new category appears that expands her options a hundredfold: ally.

  For long minutes the two hunting spiders examine their mental maps while the Scytodes hangs patiently oblivious between them. Then Portia watches the male creep around the web’s edge a little. He waits for her to move. She does not. He moves again. At last he has got to where his presence changes her instinctive calculation
of the odds.

  She moves off along the course that she had been plotting out, creeping, jumping, descending by a thread, and all the while her mind retains its image of that three-dimensional world, and the two other spiders inside it.

  At last she is in position above the Scytodes’s web, back in sight of the motionless male. She waits until he makes his move. He skitters on to the silken strands, cautiously testing his footing. His movements are mechanical, repetitive, as though he is just some fragment of dead leaf that has drifted into the web. The Scytodes shifts once, then remains still. A breeze shivers the web and the male moves more swiftly under cover of the white noise of the shaking strands.

  He bounces and dances abruptly, speaking the language of the web in loud and certain terms: Prey! Prey here, trying to escape!

  The Scytodes is instantly on the move and Portia strikes, dropping down behind her displaced enemy and sinking her fangs into it. Her poison immobilizes the other spider swiftly. The hunt is concluded.

  Soon after, the little male returns and they regard one another, trying to build a new picture of their world. They feed. She is constantly on the verge of driving him away and yet that new dimension, that commonality, stays her fangs. He is prey. He is not prey.

  Later, they hunt together again. They make a good team. Together they are able to take on targets and situations that, alone, either would have retreated from.

  Eventually he is promoted from prey/not-prey to mate, because her behaviours are limited as regards males. After the act of mating, other instincts surface and their partnership comes to an end.

  She lays her clutch, the many eggs of a very successful huntress.

  Their children will be beautiful and brilliant and grow to twice her size, infected with the nanovirus that Portia and the male both carry. Further generations will be larger and brighter and more successful still, one after the other selectively evolving at a virally accelerated rate so that those best able to exploit this new advantage will dominate the gene pool of the future.