Gathering Evidence

by Martin MacInnes

  First efforts to manipulate extra-terrestrial objects focused on asteroids. Semi-autonomous mechanical structures observed and adapted to the asteroid’s trajectory, intercepted the rock body and began an extensive mining operation. The extracted ore was collected and shuttled back to Earth at regular intervals, a private enterprise launched by an anonymous individual. A press release revealed that the ore was of secondary importance to the mission, and its principal objective was to carve long stretches of a particular pattern, believed to belong to the deceased partner of the benefactor, onto the asteroid. The operation, still with no known end date, had achieved its first success. The press release stated that the carving, carried out simultaneously by thousands of smaller machines, reached far into the rock, significantly altering its mass and orbit. Video streams broadcast footage of the asteroid’s movement, cutting from clips of the drilling to a higher vantage showing aspects of the carved design, to a distant shot, taken by one of the returning ore capsules, of the asteroid spinning in space.

  The tribute to the deceased individual comprised three distinct stages: the hollows put into the object; the new course of its voyage through the solar system; and the more conventional reverential structures built, on Earth, by ore extracted from the asteroid.

  Beyond this first experiment, plans were made to impart the whole of a nest onto an extra-terrestrial structure. The world’s wealthiest individuals competed to fund these missions and project their nest in space. Previously, full-pattern renderings had taken place only virtually, in holograms or in other simulated representations. The reasons were strictly practical, nests comprising too much information to be rendered in terrestrial areas.

  The process required use of a large, previously untouched object: a planet. Planets were to become representative entities, maintaining a one-to-one correspondence with the life of the source user. Teams of astronomers, astrophysicists and astroengineers consulted on potential effects, not only on the mass of the carved planet, and hence its orbit, but also on that of any of the chain of neighbouring moons, planets, satellites and asteroids, and of course on Earth itself. A project spokeswoman used the phrase ‘altered heavens’, and there was discussion at various levels of possible effects on the daily life of people on Earth. This, again, would be part of a larger exhibition, the continuous tribute to the user carved across the planet.

  Environmentalists, biologists and animal rights activists submitted grave fears about the effects the changed night sky might have on any number of migrating species, from the former-Arctic tern to the mid-Atlantic giant green turtle, who were believed, in a process still not fully understood, to gather information from the magnetism of the Earth’s core, from genetically instantiated ancestral memories and from the patterns and revolutions of the astral bodies seen in the seas under them and the sky above them. Should the night sky be even minutely altered from its predictable course, there were sure to be waves of catastrophic animal behaviour, not only in those larger vertebrate species that appealed to sympathy, but also in ecologically crucial species such as green locusts and melanaphis aphids, whose sudden astral miscalculations could set in chain disastrous effects on their plant symbionts, creating almost unimaginable ruin of the Earth’s total food system. All of this, the full reach of each line of effects, derived directly from even the most idle moments in the source user’s life.

  Sociologists, economists and state administrators expressed fears about the unpredictable effects an alien sky might have on swathes of the human population. There was anxiety about sudden political turmoil and market ruptures after the ground and sky became unidentifiable, genuinely unpredictable human behaviour emerging from this abrupt sense of unmooring, of a global deracination – melatonin fluctuating, diurnal body settings running askew – as people’s fundamental sense of instantiation, of duration, of being alive in time and space, was put into jeopardy. It would be all but impossible, experts said, to factor in the full range of possible effects. The smallest adaptation may ripple out into vast and overwhelming health and behavioural changes. Previously undisclosed reports noted correlations between the installation of larger satellites in low Earth orbit and spikes of resistance to previously reliable courses of medication. Artificial manipulation of the night sky, in such instances, appeared to produce infinitesimal changes in the rhythms of sunlight and passing time, changes still too subtle to measure instrumentally but picked up, nevertheless, unconsciously by animal and plant bodies. Fears grew over productivity and fertility; hysterical protests warned of threats to the continued existence of the species. Fractional, apparently negligible alterations to the course of the Earth’s orbit – noted already in the most devastating earthquakes, which seemed to rip and gouge out slabs of time as well as space – may well upset the range of delicate, precariously balanced homeostatic controls keeping people alive. As declining fertility threatened future life, so too did suboptimal or erratic functioning of various autonomic processes, from the ability to breathe and walk, to the capacity of the inner ear to measure balance, to the immune system’s success or failure in recognising a distinct and individual human body. Any and all of these autonomous controls may, at any time and under the slightest and most innocuous provocation, give up; the risk, then, so various experts argued, in so significantly adapting the sky was entirely unmerited.

  Among the most powerful and vocal dissenters to planet manipulation were religious leaders, with representatives from various faiths united in agreeing it was an affront to the creator. Astroengineering, whether conceived for practical or aesthetic reasons, was an act of gargantuan egotism, idol worship on a hitherto unimagined scale. The project drew particularly vehement scorn from factions occupied with the question of the physical location of God, concerned at possible retribution on man for the folly of disturbing His position in the seat of the heavens. The transgression should not be risked and must be sabotaged by any means necessary. Long communal meditation and prayer sessions were devoted to obstructing this impending obscenity; leaders spoke of an instantaneous shattering of the fundaments of space and time, a sudden voiding of matter, of everything coming not into darkness but into absence of darkness and light.

  Related protests gathered around other Nest Inc. transgressions, including the digital planets programmed to express a user’s life. Religious sects requested full acknowledgement not only of these simulated planets, but of the countries, cities, flora, fauna and especially the sim-human populations inside them too. They demanded guarantees for the continued protection of these habitats and civilisations, the granting, to these vast populations, of full legal recognition, of confirmation of their status as autonomous, sentient beings. Sim-people generated their own nests, patterns which could be rendered in a further simulated world, itself containing a large population, leading to further nests and yet further, a process of apparently infinite regress. The priests submitted lengthy formal proposals to the administrators of Nest Inc., laying out a programme that would include translation efforts, teachings of the word of God and finally vast baptisms, sanctifying and realising simulated people by water. Engineers built comprehensive patches that would incorporate rudimentary religious instruction within digital planets; extensive missionary efforts would follow in due course. In addition to saving the populations’ souls, they proposed amending all aspects of culture, from architectural standards to prohibitions on food, in order that these simulated planets would conform no longer to a single human individual but to God Himself, who has created all.

  At the same time, religious factions discovered certain opportunities inside nests. Nests were a form of revelation, and it followed that careful attention paid to these patterns would bring believers closer to God. Again, affiliated coders and software engineers were instrumental. Tightly air-controlled networks of servers and terminals were built into desert cave channels, optimally conducting and preserving the information, as powerful deep-learning software parsed collections of donated nests, seeking out intima
tions of pattern and structure. Priest coders uploaded and copied nest after nest, enunciating long sequences of numbers. The software grew more sophisticated and powerful as greater data sets were fed to it, leading to exponential increases in productivity. The priests found they could train the software, that if they withheld data, it then attacked it more powerfully when fed. The effects after each starvation were more radical than the last. With every new batch, the priests spilled libations onto the earth floor, complementing the sacrament of the body that was eaten.

  Significance and structure began appearing in the output. The priests were in no doubt, now, that what was unfurling around them was a message contained inside a code, a vast total code arrayed across the movement of every individual who had lived. Their fear was that the limited amount of data harvested – being only in the hundreds of millions of people at this stage – may not be sufficient to render the whole message comprehensible. They worked on and on in the caves, singing the scrolls of numbers quietly.

  The priests knew it was vulgar to speculate on what was written in the code; it would be revealed in time, however long that may be. But they saw it was His voice. On several occasions they were struck and marked by emissions of electricity, the voice emitting loose pieces of the emerging message. They bowed, grateful for the pain and the marks bestowed on them.

  The message accumulated, years and decades passing, the line of priests sustained by the select group of priestesses occupying a single narrow chamber in the caves. Both groups were affected by the voice, marked by its revelations, their bodies distorted into the shape best equipped to serve their purpose.

  As the message was slowly revealed to them they finally saw what it was. Spoken through the rendered lives of all humankind, every person who had lived, was the true name of God. His name, resplendent but concealed, fragmented throughout creation, composed a series of instructions. The priests sang out and went prostrate before the name, which gathered and thickened in great dense blocks of information, and they began to build.

  They gave thanks with every step, overflowing with gratitude. They saw, as the building went on, the divine perfection finally revealed in the name, and they saw that it could never have been other than this. With every addition they made, building it, they saw that the name was moving them backwards, that as they built they eroded time. At the end, when the weapon was complete, as the last deformed priest went to press the release signal, they saw what had happened and wept. They were transported, taken to the moment of creation. Pressing to signal the release of the warhead, time unfolded and they existed infinitely, in the boundless glory and wisdom of the name, and it was as if all of this, all of the Earth and all of the heavens, had never been.

  PART TWO

  Westenra Park

  I

  He noticed it for the first time driving Shel to the airport in the evening. As a precaution they’d given themselves an hour for the journey but the roads were oddly quiet. Passing through the marshes, it appeared suddenly ahead of them – a shift, a low cloud, a distortion. He slowed. They felt it again a minute later, a thick sheet of fog drifting in from the coast.

  Flights were grounded and the terminal filled up, then surged over capacity. The air was terrible; it was difficult to move. People yelling, sudden spasms of movement, odd rippling effects from one end of the concourse to the other. Shel tried to get hold of her colleagues, who were connecting from separate cities. The signal came in and out; she couldn’t get a good line. People butted against her, knocking her arm as she tried to create space to focus on the call. This was critical. She risked disrupting the whole project if she was late. John trailed her from desk to desk, pushing past the banks of static passengers. Shel ran through a list of contingency plans: the first flight was a short transfer; the crucial flight was the second one. There must be another way of getting there. Could they transfer her overland? She repeated – to herself, to him, to the official oppressed under a dozen shrieks – that she had no option, it was imperative, she simply had to make that second flight.

  An announcement, a reprieve, barely credible – the flight was boarding. A sudden wave through the crowds, murmurs of confusion, excitement stirring. They had no time for goodbyes – a quick hug, a perfunctory kiss on the edge of security. He stood by the glass watching the runway, tracking the rows of studded red lights. He could only just make out the aircraft. Surely there was a mistake? Surely she wasn’t flying in this?

  He couldn’t bear to watch the aircraft rise, fearing that something would emerge out of the fog, colliding with her plane, bringing it down. He turned away and found a café, sipping coffee and waiting in the terminal until the flight disappeared from the screen. Only three flights had departed in the previous two hours and everything still listed was cancelled or delayed.

  Why, he thought, was she so determined to go, at any cost? She shouldn’t put herself at risk. No-one would blame her for waiting, and the university would cover any fees. Of course he knew the answer was simple. He understood her work was a priority above all else. They had been through this many times over the past six years.

  The uncertainty of Shel’s flight; the lack of information on the project; the loud, hostile activity all around him – it was understandable he was anxious. Whenever she departed on fieldwork, he felt this low panic, a certainty something was about to go wrong. Things were more fraught this time because of the suddenness of the offer, the lack of preparation time, the minimal information made available to her group. And then the weather, the fog rising, the confusion at the airport.

  He had been sitting at the café an hour when he grabbed at the phone vibrating in his jacket, almost dropped it. Landed. Boarding again soon. Flight was fine. Love you, S. He breathed out. He could leave – everything was okay. As he got up and exited the airport, calculating how much the extended stay in the car park was going to cost him, he remained mildly anxious, with a feeling of quiet, stubborn dread. He felt as if there was something he had either forgotten or had not yet realised, something floating on the edge of his vision.

  He arrived home late and slept fitfully. The next morning he looked from the tall window onto the thick fog. He had no plans for the weekend so he stayed largely in the house, going out occasionally to the edge of the fields, distant headlamps glowing in the vapour. Shel wrote, confirming her second flight had landed and that she’d checked into the hotel. Everything was fine, she said, everything was okay. She had used the same expression twice in two days. It didn’t sound like her. Was his anxiety so apparent? Generally they communicated little when she was out on research. She was to focus exclusively on the work; they’d get in touch only in an emergency. He started thumbing in a response, when a message came through, the network provider apologising for the recent loss of service – circumstances beyond our control – warning of further disruption in the days to come. He looked at the phone reception and saw the bars had disappeared.

  He paced the house, unable to settle. He couldn’t decide what to eat. He picked up one book then put it aside for another. The day passed and he retired to bed; he woke sober and alert in the early hours. He had never previously had any problems sleeping. It was one of the things in his life he was quietly grateful for – the inevitability of unconsciousness. As the disruption was so unusual he thought there might have been an outside cause – a siren, a distant car alarm, a change in temperature, a sudden flare of light at the window. He sat up, hearing only the faint, distant stirring of the trees beyond the fields. He was still adjusting to the sounds. The gulls’ cries worst twice a day, the distant machinery in the fields, the cattle moaning in the night. The wind whistling inside the walls’ hollows, the scurrying sounds beyond the plaster. The house was temporary. Construction was just beginning on their own place, in a new estate past the edge of a forest. The agent was supposed to update them this weekend, but his phone signal was still out, and the router in the living room had started blinking red.

  It was the first time
John had visited the estate since they’d signed the contract; the drive took a little longer as the fog had failed to clear completely. He pulled in to the makeshift car park, clipped the door closed and lifted up his hood. Deserted, the site looked enormous, much bigger than he remembered. The construction vehicles were parked at odd angles, as if the crew had left hurriedly, some sudden event causing them to scatter. There were stacks of slabs and slates, and barrows and carts had tipped over. Food wrappers stuck to the fence and a length of blue tarpaulin battered in the wind. A rope fence formed a second perimeter further into the site, and beyond this the dug ground was piled in a large spiralling cone shape. He ducked under the rope and walked towards the excavation, the long pit prepared for the first several houses, and peered inside.

  His instinct was to immediately call Shel, though of course that wasn’t possible. They were to go inside it? To build a home, a life, in the ground? A ladder was set into the pit. He glanced around and then he climbed down. Inside it was immediately darker and the surface was far away. He knelt and identified points where the roots had been grubbed out. You could still see the dips where they’d split and removed stones, the frowns the machinery left in the soil. He swept the looser dirt away, startled as something unpleasant brushed his hand – the chitinous casing of a black beetle, uncovered and dazzled on its back.

  He climbed out. The fog was thickening again, the temperature dropping. He had to concentrate on his feet so he didn’t disturb or trip on any of the materials. He glanced back to the excavation, then he heard something. He paused, focused. Someone was there. Someone was watching him. The tarp rattling in the breeze; the cameras he subconsciously registered hanging from the fence in nests. He stood listening, the vapour in the air leaving beads of moisture on his jacket. He heard nothing. Nothing was there.