Godlike Machines

by Johnathan Strahan

“Because I’m standing here in pajamas and a stolen coat. Because I’ve come all the way from the facility just to see you, through the snow. Because there’s something I want you to know.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I’d rather show you, Nesha. Besides, I’m going to die of the cold if I stand here much longer.”

  I look to the outside world again, through one of the panes that hasn’t been broken and covered over with plywood. Another Zil slides by. This one has bodies in it: grey-skinned men sitting upright in dark coats and hats.

  “I don’t want any trouble from the police.”

  “I won’t stay long. Then I’ll be on my way, and no one will have to know that I was here.”

  “I’ll know.”

  “Please, let me in.” I haven’t bargained for this. In all the versions of this encounter that I’ve run through my mind before the escape, she never needed any persuasion to meet me. “Nesha, you need to understand. They tried to bury you, but you were right all along. That’s what I want to tell you about. Before they silence me, and no one ever gets to find out.”

  After an age she says, “You think it matters now, Dimitri Ivanov?”

  “It matters more than you can imagine.”

  The door buzzes. She’s letting me in.

  “It’s blacker than I was expecting.”

  “Of course it’s black,” I said, pausing in my ham-fisted typing. “What other color were you expecting?”

  Yakov was still staring out the porthole, at the looming Matryoshka. It was two hundred kilometers away, but still ate up more than half the sky. No stars in that direction, just a big absence like the mother of all galactic supervoids. We had the cabin lights dimmed so he could get a good view. We had already spread the relay microsats around the alien machine, ready for when the Progress penetrated one of the transient windows in Shell 3. But you couldn’t see the microsats from here- they were tiny, and the machine was vast.

  “What I mean is ...” Yakov started saying.

  “Is that it’s black.”

  “I mean it’s more than black. It’s like-black was black, and now there’s something in my head that’s even darker, like a color I never imagined until now, which was always there, just waiting for this moment.”

  “I’m concerned about you, comrade,” said Galenka, who was riding the exercise cycle in one corner of the module. She was wearing a skin-tight load-suit, designed to preserve muscle tone even in weightlessness. Maybe I’d been in space too long, but she looked better in that load-suit every day.

  “You don’t feel it, then?” Yakov asked, directing his question to both of us.

  “It’s just dark,” I said. “I guess nothing’s really prepared us for this, but it’s not something we should be surprised about. The last two apparitions ...”

  “Just machines, just dumb space probes. This is the first time anyone’s seen it with their own eyes.” Yakov turned slowly from the porthole. He was pale, with the puffy, slit-eyed look we’d all developed since leaving Earth. “Don’t you think that changes things? Don’t you think us being out here, us being observers, changes things? We’re not just making measurements on this thing from a distance now. We’re interacting, touching it, feeling it.”

  “And I think you need to get some sleep,” Galenka said.

  I folded the workstation keyboard back into its recess. I had been answering questions from schoolchildren; the selected few that had been deemed worthy of my attention by the mission schedulers.

  “Tell me you don’t feel a little freaked out, Dimitri.”

  “Maybe a bit,” I allowed. “But no more than I’d feel if we were in orbit around Mars, or Venus, or creeping up on an asteroid. It’s a very big thing and we’re very small and a long way from home.”

  “This is also a very alien big thing. It was made by alien minds, for a purpose we can’t grasp. It’s not just some lump of rock with a gravitational field. It’s a machine, a ship, that they sent to our solar system for a reason.”

  “It’s a dead alien thing,” Galenka said, huffing as she cycled harder, pushing through an uphill part of her training schedule. “Someone made it once, but it’s broken now. Fucked like an old clock. If it wasn’t fucked, it wouldn’t be on this stupid elliptical orbit.”

  “Maybe this orbit is all part of the plan,” Yakov said.

  “He’s starting to sound like Nesha Petrova,” Galenka said teasingly. “Be careful, Yakov. You know what happened to her when she didn’t shut up with her silly ideas.”

  “What plan?” I asked.

  “That thing must be thousands of years old. Tens of thousand, maybe more. The fact that it’s been on this orbit for 24 years proves nothing. It’s an eye-blink, as far as that thing’s concerned. It might just be waking up, running systems checks, rebooting itself. It came through a wormhole. Who knows what that does to something?”

  “You certainly don’t,” Galenka said.

  “She’s right,” I said. “It’s dead. If it was going to wake up, it would have done so during the first two apparitions. We poked and prodded it enough the second time; nothing happened.”

  “I wish I shared your reassurance.”

  I shrugged. “We’re just here to do a job, Yakov. Get in, get out. Then go home and get the glory, like good cosmonauts. Before I worried about the Matryoshka, I’d worry about not screwing up your part in it.”

  “I’m not going to screw up.” He looked at me earnestly, as if I had challenged him. “Did I ever screw up in the simulations, Dimitri? Did I ever screw up once?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But this isn’t a simulation. We’re not in Star City now.”

  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 and 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?”