Godlike Machines

by Johnathan Strahan

  Tension exited the body. The head lolled back into the frame, looking sideways. His arm slumped to the side, dangling over the side of the plinth. The fist relaxed, letting something small and metallic drop to the floor.

  I reached down and picked up the item, taking it as gingerly I could in my suit gloves. It was a tiny metal box with a handle in the side and I stared down at it as if it was the most alien thing in the universe. Which, in that moment, I think it probably was.

  “A keepsake,” I said, wondering aloud. “Something he was allowed to bring with him from the future. Something as ancient as the world he was aiming for. Something that must have been centuries old when he began his journey.”

  “Maybe,” Galenka said.

  I closed my own fist around the musical box. It was a simple human trinket, the most innocent of machines. I wanted to take my gloves off, to find out what it played. But I wondered if I already knew.

  A little later the chrome tide came to wash us away again.

  The men are waiting next to Nesha’s apartment when we return with her bread. I never saw their Zil, if that was how they arrived. There are three of them. They all have heavy black coats on, with black leather gloves. The two burlier men—whose faces mean nothing to me—have hats on, the brims dusted with snow. The third man isn’t wearing a hat, although he has a pale blue scarf around his throat. He’s thinner than the others, with a shaven, bullet-shaped head and small round glasses that bestow a look somewhere between professorial and ascetic. Something about his face is familiar; I feel that we’ve known each other somewhere before. He’s taking a cigarette out of a packet when our eyes lock. It’s the same contraband variety I used to buy on my ride into town.

  “This is my fault,” I say to Nesha. “I didn’t mean to bring these men here.”

  “We’ve come to take you back to the facility,” the bald man says, pausing to ignite the cigarette from a miniature lighter. “Quite frankly, I didn’t expect to find you alive. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to find you.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “Of course you know me. I’m Doctor Grechko. We’ve spent a lot of time together at the facility.”

  “I’m not going back. You know that by now.”

  “I beg to differ.” He takes a long drag on the cigarette. “You’re coming with us. You’ll thank me for it eventually, I assure you.” He nods at one of the hatted men, who reaches into his coat pocket and extracts a syringe with a plastic cap on the needle. The man pinches the cap between his gloved fingers and removes it. He holds the syringe to eye level, taps away bubbles and presses the plunger to squirt out a few drops of whatever’s inside.

  The railing along the balcony is very low. We’re nine floors up, and although there’s snow on the ground, it won’t do much to cushion my fall. I’ve done what I came to do, so what’s to prevent me from taking my own life, in preference to being taken back to the facility?

  “I’m sorry I brought this on you,” I tell Nesha, and make to lift myself over the railing. My resolve at that moment was total. I’m surrendered to the fall, ready for white annihilation. I want the music in my head to end. Death and silence, for eternity.

  But I’m not fast enough, or my resolve isn’t as total as I imagine. The other hatted man rushes to me and locks his massive hand around my arm. The other one moves closer with the syringe.

  “Not just yet,” Doctor Grechko—if that was his name-says. “He’s safe now, but keep a good grip on him.”

  “What happens to Nesha?” I ask.

  Grechko looks at her, then shakes his head. “There’s no harm in talking to a madwoman, Georgi. Whatever you may have told her, she’ll confuse it with all that rubbish she already believes. No worse than telling secrets to a dog. And even if she didn’t, no one would listen to her. Really, she isn’t worth our inconvenience. You, on the other hand, are extraordinarily valuable to us.”

  Something’s wrong. I feel an icebreaker cutting through my brain.

  “My name isn’t Georgi.”

  Doctor Grechko nods solemnly. “No matter what you may currently believe, you are Doctor Georgi Kizim. You’re even wearing his coat. Look in the pocket if you doubt me—there’s a good chance you still have his security pass.”

  “No,” I insist. “I am not Georgi Kizim. I know that man, but I’m not him. I just took his coat, so that I could escape. I am the cosmonaut, Dimitri Ivanov. I was on the Tereshkova. I went into the Matryoshka.”

  “No,” Doctor Grechko corrects patiently. “You are not Ivanov. You are not the cosmonaut. He was—is, to a degree-your patient. You were assigned to treat him, to learn what you could. Unfortunately, the protocol was flawed. We thought we could prevent a repeat of what happened with Yakov, but we were wrong. You began to identify too strongly with your patient, just as Doctor Malyshev began to identify with Yakov. We still don’t understand the mechanism, but after the business with Malyshev we thought we’d put in enough safeguards to stop it happening twice. Clearly, we were wrong about that. Even with Ivanov in his vegetative state ...”

  “I am Ivanov,” I say, but with a chink of doubt opening inside me.

  “Maybe you should look in the coat,” Nesha says.

  My fingers numb with cold, I dig into the pocket until I touch the hard edge of his security pass. The hatted man’s still keeping a good hold on my arm. I pass the white plastic rectangle to Nesha. She squints, holding it at arm’s length, studying the little hologram.

  “It’s you,” she says. “There’s no doubt.”

  I shake my head. “There’s been a mistake. Our files mixed up. I’m not Doctor Kizim. I remember being on that ship, everything that happened.”

  “Only because you spent so much time in his presence,” Grechko says, not without compassion. “After Dimitri fell into the intermittent vegetative state, we considered the risks of contamination to be significantly reduced. We relaxed the safeguards.”

  “I am not Doctor Kizim.”

  “You are. Just as Malyshev believed he was Yakov, you believe you’re Ivanov. But you’ll come out of it, Georgi—trust me. We got Malyshev back in the end. It was traumatic, but eventually his old personality resurfaced. Now he remembers being Yakov, but he’s in no doubt as to his core identity. We can do the same for you, I promise. Just come back with us, and all will be well.”

  “Look at the picture,” Nesha says, handing the pass back to me.

  I do. My eyes take a moment to focus—the snow and the cold are making them water—but when they do there’s no doubt. I’m looking at the same face that I’d seen in the mirror in Nesha’s apartment. Cleaned and tidied, but still me.

  “I’m scared.”

  “Of course you’re scared. Who wouldn’t be?” Grechko stubs out the cigarette and extends a gloved hand. “Will you come with us now, Georgi? So that we can start helping you?”

  “I have no choice, do I?”

  “It’s for the best.”

  Seeing that I’m going to come without a struggle, Grechko nods at the man with the syringe to put it back in his pocket. The other hatted man gives me an encouraging shove, urging me to start walking along the landing to the waiting elevator. I resist for a moment, looking back at Nesha. I crave some last moment of connection with the woman I’ve risked my life to visit.

  She nods once.

  I don’t think Grechko or the other men see her do it. Then she pulls her hand from her pocket and shows me the musical box, before closing her fist on it as if it’s the most secret and precious thing in the universe. As if recalling something from a dream, I remember another hand placing that musical box in mine. It’s the hand of a cosmonaut, urging me to do something before he slips into coma.

  I have no idea what’s going to happen to either of us now. Nesha’s old, but not so old that she might not have decades of life ahead of her. If she’s ever doubted that she was right, she now has concrete proof. A life redeemed, if it needed redeeming. They’ll still humiliate her at every tur
n, given the chance. But she’ll know with an iron certainty they’re wrong, and she’ll also know that everything they stand for will one day turn to dust.

  “Am I really Doctor Kizim?” I ask Grechko, as the elevator takes us down.

  “You know it in your heart.”

  I stroke my face, comparing what I touch with the memories I feel to be real. “I was so sure.”

  “That’s the way it happens. But it’s a good sign that you’re already questioning these fundamental certainties.”

  “The cosmonaut?” I ask, suddenly unable to mention him by name.

  “Yes?”

  “You mentioned him being in an intermittent vegetative state.”

  “He’s been like that for a while. I’m surprised you don’t remember. He just lies there and watches us. Watches us and hums, making the same tune over and over again. One of us recognized it eventually.” With only mild interest Grechko adds, “That piece by Prokofiev, the famous one?”

  “Troika,” I say, as the door opens. “Yes, I know it well.”

  They take me out into the snow, to the Zil that must have been waiting out of sight. The man with the syringe walks ahead and opens the rear passenger door, beckoning me into it as if I’m some high-ranking party official. I get in without causing a scene. The Zil’s warm and plush and silent.

  As we speed away from Star City, I press my face against the glass and watch the white world rush by as if in a sleigh-ride.

  RETURN TO TITAN

  Stephen Baxter

  Stephen Baxter is one of the most important science fiction writers to emerge from Britain in the past 30 years. His “Xeelee” sequence of novels and short stories is arguably the most significant work of future history in modern science fiction. Baxter is the author of more than 40 books and over 100 short stories. His most recent book is Stone Spring, first in the ‘Northland’ trilogy.

  Members of the Poole family have shown up in Baxter’s Xeelee series, most recently in Transcendant, the story collection that closed the “Destiny’s Children” sequence. In “Return to Titan” Baxter sends Harry Poole, his son Michael, and an unlikely crew into the outer reaches of our solar system to do a little business and explore something very strange indeed.

  PROLOGUE

  Probe

  The spacecraft from Earth sailed through rings of ice.

  In its first week in orbit around Saturn it passed within a third of a million kilometers of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Its sensors peered curiously down at unbroken haze.

  The craft had been too heavy to launch direct with the technology of the time, so its flight path, extending across seven years, had taken it on swingbys past Venus, Earth, and Jupiter. Primitive it was, but it was prepared for Titan. An independent lander, a fat pie-dish shape three meters across, clung to the side of the main body. Dormant for most of the interplanetary cruise, the probe was at last woken and released.

  And, two weeks later, it dropped into the thick atmosphere of Titan itself.

  Much of the probe’s interplanetary velocity was shed in ferocious heat, and the main parachute was released. Portals opened and booms unfolded, and more than a billion kilometers from the nearest human engineer, instruments peered out at Titan. Some 50 kilometers up the surface slowly became visible. This first tantalizing glimpse was like a high-altitude view of Earth, though rendered in somber reds and browns.

  The landing in gritty water-ice sand was slow, at less than 20 kilometers per hour.

  After a journey of so many years the surface mission lasted mere minutes before the probe’s internal batteries were exhausted, and the chatter of telemetry fell silent. It would take two more hours for news of the adventure to crawl at lightspeed to Earth, by which time a thin organic rain was already settling on the probe’s upper casing, as the last of its internal heat leaked away.

  And then, all unknown to the probe’s human controlers back on Earth, a manipulator not unlike a lobster’s claw closed around Huygens’s pie-dish hull and dragged the crushed probe down beneath the water-ice sand.

  I

  Earthport

  “There’s always been something wrong with Titan.” These were the first words I ever heard Harry Poole speak-though I didn’t know the man at the time-words that cut through my hangover like a drill. “It’s been obvious since the first primitive probes got there 1600 years ago.” He had the voice of an older man, 70, 80 maybe, a scratchy texture. “A moon with a blanket of air, a moon that cradles a whole menagerie of life under its thick atmosphere. But that atmosphere’s not sustainable.”

  “Well, the mechanism is clear enough. Heating effects from the methane component keep the air from cooling and freezing out.” This was another man’s voice, gravely, a bit somber, the voice of a man who took himself too seriously. The voice sounded familiar. “Sunlight drives methane reactions that dump complex hydrocarbons in the stratosphere—”

  “But, son, where does the methane come from?” Harry Poole pressed. “It’s destroyed by the very reactions that manufacture all those stratospheric hydrocarbons. Should all be gone in a few million years, ten million tops. So what replenishes it?”

  At that moment I could not have cared less about the problem of methane on Saturn’s largest moon, even though, I suppose, it was a central facet of my career. The fog in my head, thicker than Titan’s tholin haze, was lifting slowly, and I became aware of my body, aching in unfamiliar ways, stretched out on some kind of couch.

  “Maybe some geological process.” This was a woman’s voice, a bit brisk. “That or an ecology, a Gaia process that keeps the methane levels up. Those are the obvious options.”

  “Surely, Miriam,” Harry Poole said. “One or the other. That’s been obvious since the methane on Titan was first spotted from Earth. But nobody knows. Oh, there have been a handful of probes over the centuries, but nobody’s taken Titan seriously enough to nail it down. Always too many other easy targets for exploration and colonization-Mars, the ice moons. Nobody’s even walked on Titan!”

  Another man, a third, said, “But the practical problems— the heat loss in that cold air-it was always too expensive to bother, Harry. And too risky ...”

  “No. Nobody had the vision to see the potential of the place. That’s the real problem. And now we’re hamstrung by these damn sentience laws.”

  “And you think we need to know.” That gravel voice.

  “We need Titan, son,” Harry Poole said. “It’s the only hope I see of making our wormhole link pay for itself. Titan is, ought to be, the key to opening up Saturn and the whole outer System. We need to prove the sentience laws don’t apply there, and move in and start opening it up. That’s what this is all about.”

  The woman spoke again. “And you think this wretched creature is the key.”

  “Given he’s a sentience curator, and a crooked one at that, yes ...”

  When words like “wretched” or “crooked” are bandied about in my company it’s generally Jovik Emry that’s being discussed. I took this as a cue to open my eyes. Some kind of glassy dome stretched over my head, and beyond that a slice of sky-blue. I recognized the Earth seen from space. And there was something else, a sculpture of electric blue thread that drifted over a rumpled cloud layer.

  “Oh, look,” said the woman. “It’s alive.”

  I stretched, swivelled and sat up. I was stiff and sore, and had a peculiar ache at the back of my neck, just beneath my skull. I looked around at my captors. There were four of them, three men and a woman, all watching me with expressions of amused contempt. Well, it wasn’t the first time I’d woken with a steaming hangover in an unknown place surrounded by strangers. I would recover quickly. I was as young and healthy as I could afford to be: I was around 40, but AS-preserved at my peak of 23.

  We sat on couches at the center of a cluttered circular deck, domed over by a scuffed carapace. I was in a GUTship, then, a standard interplanetary transport, if an elderly one; I had traveled in such vessels many times, to Saturn a
nd back. Through the clear dome I could see more of those electric-blue frames drifting before the face of the Earth. They were tetrahedral, and their faces were briefly visible, like soap films that glistened gold before disappearing. These were the mouths of wormholes, flaws in spacetime, and the golden shivers were glimpses of other worlds.

  I knew where I was. “This is Earthport.” My throat was dry as moondust, but I tried to speak confidently.

  “Well, you’re right about that.” This was the man who had led the conversation earlier. That 70-year-old voice, comically, came out of the face of a boy of maybe 25, with blond hair, blue eyes, a smooth AntiSenescence marvel. The other two men looked around 60, but with AS so prevalent it was hard to tell. The woman was tall, her hair cut short, and she wore a functional jumpsuit; she might have been 45. The old-young man spoke again. “My name is Harry Poole. Welcome to the Hermit Crab, which is my son’s ship—”

  “Welcome? You’ve drugged me and brought me here—”

  One of the 60-year-olds laughed, the gruff one. “Oh, you didn’t need drugging; you did that to yourself.”

  “You evidently know me—and I think I know you.” I studied him. He was heavy set, dark, not tall, with a face that wasn’t built for smiling. “You’re Michael Poole, aren’t you? Poole the wormhole engineer.”

  Poole just looked back at me. Then he turned to the blond man. “Harry, I have a feeling we’re making a huge mistake trying to work with this guy.”

  Harry grinned, studying me. “Give it time, son. You’ve always been an idealist. You’re not used to working with people like this. I am. We’ll get what we want out of him.”

  I turned to him. “Harry Poole. You’re Michael’s father, aren’t you?” I laughed at them. “A father who AS-restores himself to an age younger than your son. How crass. And, Harry, you really ought to get something done about that voice.”