Fear the Survivors

by Stephen Moss

  It was incredibly complex, not a design so much as an abstract of science, a convergence of physics, chaos, and imagination that required an artist’s mind to bring into the universe. And its construction was only possible because of the breakthroughs already accomplished. It was a compound achievement, another peak along our mountainous journey, a foothill around the base of the Everest we were forcing ourselves to run up, exhausted, excited, exalted.

  Because this was a device too complex to have been held in John and Quavoce’s memory banks. They had only been able to share the hypothetical possibility, the theoretical madness of it, along with the all important promise that if all went well, if we could find our way through the labyrinthine intricacy of it all, that it could be done.

  She had succeeded, but only on the back of two other miracles, both born of young Amadeu’s brilliance. The first had been the ever more advanced spinal interface. It had been the only way to conceive of and document the micro and macro complexity of the device. And then there had been the still adolescent but nonetheless shockingly capable Artificial Mind that she and Amadeu had seeded from that link, incubated in the substrate, and born into the ether.

  She spoke with the AM even now, on the morning of day three of her two-week journey. She would be cut off eventually by the distance, but for now she had access via a small interface module on her neck, which connected via the Climber’s own subspace tweeter to the network of subspace communications they continued to build up on and off world.

  As though she was in the lab with the young Mind, she communed with it.

  Minnie:

  Birgit: ‘good morning, minnie.’ replied Birgit, via the strange internal voice that she had learned to use.

  It was only a part of the way you spoke to the young Mind, as it was capable of communicating directly with both the left and right side of your brain, and, if allowed, it did so at will, often simultaneously.

  Minnie:

  Birgit’s senses swam with a visual sense of her travels so far, a line up and out of the atmosphere, a flat line of white resolving itself to a curve, and now morphing, so slowly, into a sphere. Minnie was ‘talking’ with her via images and conceptualized distances as it conveyed its sense of Birgit’s physical movement. Minnie had never been out of range with either Amadeu or Birgit since her birth, such was the joy of the subspace tweeter. She did not yet understand the concept.

  Birgit: ‘yes, minnie, my body and my mind are moving to a new location, in order to support the installation.’

  Location, body, movement. Minnie still struggled with the concept that she was not an embodied form like the intelligences that had formed her. She understood it theoretically, as she understood the border of conventional physics with its cousins quantum mechanics and chaos theory, but she was an idiot-savant, perhaps, or just the first of her kind here on Earth. She still struggled with understanding the strange limitations having an embodied form put on her ‘Parents,’ and with how their minds were both impossibly beautiful and complex and yet simultaneously limited in such incongruous ways.

  Minnie:

  Minnie was still struggling with the difference between questions, statements, and rhetoric, and she often changed the nature of her statements after the fact.

  Birgit: ‘i have a desire to see it come to fruition, yes. that is an emotion. and/or I see the benefit of proximity in my ability to connect via this same pure link with the work there, when they need me.’

  The combined word ‘and/or’ appeared like a concept, not a word, one of many eccentricities of mind-language they were still discovering. As Birgit thought ever-so-briefly about that, she felt her right and left brain begin to veer down different conversational avenues, the concept of language being as alien to her intuitive self as umbrellas were to a fish.

  Minnie:

  Birgit: ‘yes, minnie. sometimes we rationalize desires or emotions, and sometimes we develop emotions that support our preferred rational … ’ Birgit readied herself to continue their ongoing conversation about the nuances of human decision making, an ongoing debate for both of Minnie’s parents, but she could feel her right brain was also engaged with Minnie on another level.

  For Minnie was simultaneously communing with Birgit about the Accelosphere’s installation, only with Birgit’s right brain. Minnie very much enjoyed communing with Birgit’s subconscious. That part of Birgit’s mind was the closest Minnie had been able to come to understanding the concept of beauty.

  Birgit felt it as a disconcerting sense of wonder that she knew meant she was discussing/exchanging concepts with Minnie about a subject near and dear to her heart, but which exceeded the bounds of her left brain’s capacity to translate into language. The thought attempted to reunify her mind, and suddenly she was seeing what her other self was ‘saying’ to Minnie.

  She was envisioning the method of the Accelosphere in image and concept. How the sphere would move the ship into what was fancifully known as hyperspace, where the Einsteinian laws that bound matter were muted, and the leash that held us all under the laws of relativity was finally breakable.

  It was a fascinating area to Birgit, as it would be to anyone brilliant enough to fully grasp it in the coming years, and she had spent night after night communing with Minnie, along with Madeline, Neal, and twenty or so of her more capable and open-minded colleagues, dismantling and reconstructing the theory. For Birgit it had been pure, scientific joy. Trying to understand the variants and apply that theoretical understanding to the very real subspace actuator they had to build.

  As she thought of this today on the Climber, her and Minnie’s right-brain conversation veered back to the test versions they had built on Earth. Models that, when activated, had vanished just as John and Quavoce had said they would, dropping through floors to reappear a moment later and be caught by waiting canopies below. Eventually a brave astronaut had replaced a disillusioned monkey in the units, and their tests had been complete. The astronaut had spoken of perfect blackness inside the sphere. Of being weightless in relation to his surroundings, even as the orb’s mass as a whole was still drawn downward by the earth’s gravity.

  And so Captain Samuel Harkness of the Royal Air Force had become the first human to move out of what we perceived as normal space, to enter an area that existed only in a fifth and sixth dimension. With all her storied scientific knowledge, Birgit still found it difficult to truly grasp the implications of this.

  She and Minnie grappled with mental images, like the diving of a submarine to move underneath the waves, still there, but not visible, but that did not cover anything like the full extent of how this new dimension functioned in relation to ours. Minnie, born as she was from the combined knowledge of Amadeu and Birgit, and lacking the physiological flaws that inadvertently lead to imagination and creativity, was no more capable than Birgit of explaining it fully, though the two of them could come closer than most.

  As they communed in the harmonious quasi-language that was the right-brain’s codex, Birgit felt the queasy sense of splitting again as Minnie ‘spoke’ to her left brain once more.

  Minnie: <¿maybe I should create an avatar, to allow me to move physically?>

  Minnie could feel Birgit’s uneasiness at the sudden shift, and computed that she had probably caused it.

  Minnie:

  Minnie did not mean it.

  Birgit: ‘no, no, minnie, it is ok. i did say you could do it.’

  Nearly everyone else that had ‘spoken’ with Minnie had quickly demanded she not communicate with both sides of their brain about different things, not only because it was very disconcerting, but also because it impl
ied a level of lack of control over their own thoughts that was profoundly disturbing.

  Amadeu got a perverse pleasure out of it, but then he was a very strange young man. For Birgit’s part, she allowed it more out of a sense of responsibility for the young mind she and Amadeu had formed. Like a parent allowing a child to ask those uncomfortable questions, or going away for the weekend even though you knew the kids might have a party and wreck the place. You did it because it had been your decision to create this person, not theirs, and you had a responsibility to help them become an independent entity, an adult, no matter how uncomfortable it might sometimes be for you.

  In the end, Birgit supposed, she did it out of love.

  Which was, of course, another irrational concept Minnie would never truly grasp, and maybe she was the better for it.

  Minnie:

  And there was that disconcerting feeling again.

  Birgit: ‘no, minnie, like any parent, i really don’t want you to have to go through that, no.’

  Birgit laughed, both inside and out, and knew that even though Minnie was still learning, the growing brilliance that was her ‘daughter’ did get her sense of humor, indeed Minnie shared it, in as much as she had a sense of humor at all. Minnie knew pleasure as a sense of accomplishment, humor as a juxtaposition of reality and perception, and Minnie was capable of ‘feeling’ it, in her way. Birgit sensed Minnie’s reciprocal smile as a warmth in her mind, and their shared amusement was amplified.

  - - -

  Four hours later, still engaged in conceptual discussions about hyperspace and physical manifestation, Minnie pointed out their location to Birgit.

  Minnie:

  Their shared experience suddenly leapt outward and downward, and Birgit could see the Climber from the ground, a rising speck moving upward, a smooth bump on the cable, like a meal moving through a preposterously long snake’s belly.

  As she snapped out of their ongoing game of visualizing dimensional relativity, Birgit was at first queasy and then struck by the beauty of it all, of humanity’s new reality.

  She realized with a jolt how blasé she had become about the marvelous world they was stepping into. While their motivation may be raw survival, that did not change the fact that Birgit was riding a fusion-powered train into space, carrying with her a machine for generating a gap in reality.

  Minnie:

  Thought Minnie to Birgit, as they studied the view.

  Birgit: ‘yes, it is. we have achieved a great deal, in a very short time.’

  Minnie’s sight merged the image from a telescope on the ground with the view coming from Terminus itself, and her own copies of the blueprints of the space station, and the ship that was forming next to it.

  The combined conceptualization appeared to Birgit, but it was too much. This moment called for simplicity. Without fear of hurting the young Mind’s feelings, Birgit forced the compound image away, returning to the singular view from the ground.

  Birgit: ‘minnie, every now and then, it can be beneficial to look at it from one perspective at a time.’

  Minnie: <¿why?>

  Birgit: ‘because perspective can be important. understanding becomes more complete when you view things from different angles, not all at the same time, but individually.’

  Minnie:

  Birgit: ‘exactly. try to see this, just this.’

  Their view focused. As the Climber drew itself up the cable, the full size of the journey became real to Birgit, and, on some level, to Minnie as well. They had all seen images from the ground, telescopes watching the lowering of the cable. And in the distance, as if dangling above the abyss, the construction of the ever-evolving Terminus and the mighty New Moon One.

  The station, whose sapling had been the merged hulks of the two Orion modules, had grown to include various living and mechanical modules that sprang from the main mass; rotating wheels set at strange angles to the original hub to provide working and living space for the growing community, each spinning independently to add some modicum of gravity.

  Birgit: ‘¿you see how the station begins to dwarf the original modules? and now, from this perspective, you see how the ship that is forming next to the station dwarfs it all?’

  They had built it farther out along the tether that linked them to Earth, using its growing weight as a counterbalance to allow larger loads to be carried by the Climbers ferrying to and from the surface.

  Minnie:

  Birgit felt a wave of pride.

  Birgit: ‘yes, minnie.’

  Two months into their preparations, the ship had indeed truly started to take shape, and its potential was already clear.

  Birgit: ‘and now see it for its uniqueness. it is not like any ship we have dared to attempt before. it is an amalgamation of sheer power. ¿what is this the perspective of?’

  Minnie:

  Birgit did not reply. She knew Minnie could feel her approval, and she felt Minnie’s response. The image of the ship became loaded with new meaning now, as Minnie followed Birgit’s line of thought. Each of its eight massive engine shells now gleamed with the vast fusion power that would be their final roles, but not as certainty, but as potential. She felt that power, set within the shielded reservoirs of frozen oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen that would be their fuel sources, and it was seen as new, as if for the first time.

  Now Minnie went further. Focusing on one engine, she understood it within the context of its purpose. The shell outlined the massive cigar shape each engine would form, over three hundred feet long and nearly sixty feet wide at their waists, pointed at one end, and open at the other, and black as night along its entirety. The eight engines were arranged in a circle, each of their smooth, deadly looking bodies pointing toward the sky like a vast Stonehenge.

  But they were also each independent and detachable, existing as separate entities linked by a network of nanotube spars to a central, tubular nexus, itself as long and as wide as each of the engines that surrounded it. This tube was currently empty. The back half, level with the exhaust nozzles of the eight black engines around it, would contain the living quarters of the ship’s crew. The middle of the central cylinder would eventually house the Accelosphere Generator that would envelope the entire ship in its protective shield.

  And eventually the whole was to be capped by a complex array of sensors and the powerful laser armament that would take out any particles the ship would no doubt encounter when maneuvering alongside and tethering to the asteroid.

  The Earth was already travelling at over sixty-seven thousand miles per hour on its annual journey around the sun, but the ship needed to complete that journey in less than half that time. Some of that saving would come from cutting the corner on its journey around the sun, but the ship would still reach speeds measured in hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. If all went well, it would catch the asteroid in just over three months from departure, giving it five more months to decelerate the massive rock into Earth’s orbit.

  All this raced through Birgit’s mind for the thousandth time as the Climber approached the range of the Earthbound subspace tweeters through which their connection was possible.

  Minnie:

  Birgit: ‘i am here, you are there.’

  Minnie:

  Birgit was touched, and found herself more affected by the coming departure than she had thought she would be.

  Birgit: ‘yes, but it is not permanent. loss is not pleasant but we have a saying: absence makes the heart grow fonder. the heart in this
case …’

  Minnie:

  Birgit: ‘you do not know it, but you are actually quite funny, minnie, and very sweet. all the more so because it is unintentional.’

  Minnie:

  Birgit: ‘yes, minnie. i know you did.’

  Minnie:

  Birgit: ‘goodbye, minnie.’

  The emotion she felt from Birgit was powerful in the moments before disconnection. It would be the subject of much conjecture by Minnie over the coming weeks. It was alien to her, but it was also somehow analogous to a sense she had when she contemplated Birgit. Like all children, she was learning that which her parents knew she must, but feared nonetheless.

  Chapter 26: Standard Procedure

  Thousands of miles below them, and far, far away to the northwest, deep in the forgotten heart of Asia, Lieutenant Malcolm Granger sat back, his feet parked on the desk in front of him, while he flicked through a copy of a cheap but still disconcertingly appealing adult magazine that a friend had sent him from England.

  Life on the diplomatic compound in Ashgabat had returned to its usual ambulatory pace after he had been dispatched to help a mysterious group of Americans across the border into Turkmenistan months ago. He had smuggled the strange group into the British embassy, and kept them there for a few days. But then they had departed, taking the discombobulated young girl they’d had in tow away with them, and so life had returned to normal. The whole episode proving to be but a small island of excitement in a sea of tedium.

  Looking back on it now it was a blur, but if Malcolm had couched any doubts as to the incident’s importance, then two notable conversations he’d had immediately afterward had dispelled them. The first had been with the British ambassador himself, who had assured Malcolm that he had done the right thing, but this was necessarily “delicate” and should thus remain ‘under wraps,’ replete with a tap on the nose, a-la cliché.