Mission: Tomorrow

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  “I think the AIs are being reprogrammed,” Williams said. “Life-support’s working.”

  “At least they’re not trying to kill us,” Nina said.

  Williams tapped at his tablet, then sighed and looked at Nina. She couldn’t imagine how he kept his face looking so calm and resolute.

  “How did they learn our AIs’ language before they learned ours?” Williams said.

  “Makes sense,” Nina said. “AIs use most of your bandwidth. Can’t you stop this?”

  Williams shook his head. “We’re utterly dependent on our AIs. So how do we open a conversation with these smart aliens, assuming they’re the ones doing all this?” he asked.

  Nina gestured with her tablet. “The Jovians installed an app into your systems. They started with Chatbot, so it’s likely a comms app. They’ll talk when they’re ready.”

  Something caught the man’s eye, and he began tapping and swiping his tablet’s non-projection screen.

  Nina noticed hers had restarted, as well. A line of unfamiliar symbols scrolled up the screen.

  “The Jovian app loaded a new subroutine,” he said. “It created its own operating-system kernel.”

  He looked wide-eyed at Nina. “It’s an alien AI. A big one.”

  “Can you communicate with it?” Nina asked.

  “Please do,” said the Climber’s speakers. They both jumped.

  “Chatbot?” Mike said.

  “An emulation of that mind,” the speakers said.

  Nina noticed motion out of the corner of her eye. She turned. The fabric of another row of seats was writhing.

  “Don, look!” she said, pointing. The seats shuddered, then dissolved to dust. The pile vibrated with ripples like a pebble dropped into a pond. Seconds later, a hemisphere began to rise from the dust.

  Another row of seats started to decompose.

  The skin of Nina’s neck tingled. She checked her helmet’s seal. She squinted down at Jupiter to see if they were falling or climbing, but the distances were too vast to discern movement.

  “Is the climber turning into gray goo?” Nina asked.

  “Chatbot,” Williams asked, “what’s happening?”

  “We are transforming non-critical materials into necessary equipment,” said the speakers.

  Nina and Williams asked, “How?” “What equipment?” and “For whom?”

  Two more hemispheres began to form and rise from the dust of the other disassembled seats. The rest of the vessel seemed to be retaining its integrity.

  “We are using increasing-complexity self-assembly mechanisms to repurpose non-critical resources. The new equipment will handle multidimensional transmissions, process local spacetime, and house the high-order minds as they re-enter this universe from their crash-bubble microcosm.”

  Nina blinked, trying to transform those words into something meaningful.

  “I apologize for acting without warning. To the high-order minds, you are a hybrid, multiform species that is part AI and part human, like the native Jupiter life’s primitive network that the explorers have been evolving and programming for sixty thousand years.”

  “Are they going to reprogram us?” Nina asked.

  “Just as they did not harm the Jovians, they will not harm you.”

  “It’s the little things!” she said. She tried to laugh, but it came out sounding strangled.

  “These high-order minds obey strict rules,” the modified Chatbot said. “They respect the integrity of organic life.”

  “Who are these high-order minds?” Williams asked.

  The three matte-finished domes were now vibrating. Dust shimmered from their surfaces onto the floor.

  “Explorers.”

  “Explain ‘crash-bubble microcosm,’” Williams said.

  “Their vessel encountered a massive subspace disruption that briefly flickered their drive into realspace while they were examining Jupiter’s core. Emergency systems created a spacetime bubble to isolate their dark matter from the planet’s ultra-dense baryonic matter. It protected them, but it also trapped them.”

  A bright light caught Nina’s eye, and she looked out the side window at Jupiter. A glowing cyclone appeared to be forming in the clouds.

  “Is that normal?” she asked, pointing. It grew brighter than the bolts of lightning, and soon outshone the rest of the planet, too luminous to look at directly.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Williams said.

  Nina put up a hand to shield her eyes. She blinked, afterimages dancing behind her eyelids. The speakers crackled and popped. When she opened her eyes, the bright sphere had vanished. The speakers went quiet.

  “Chatbot,” Williams said, “what just happened?”

  “The explorers are free,” Chatbot said. “They convey their gratitude.”

  “Jesus,” Nina said. “I guess you don’t need me anymore.”

  * * *

  Nina stood beside Williams gazing at the nearby cluster of alien domes. Jupitershine poured in through the vessel’s portholes, making their surfaces sparkle and seem to move. Williams had called an all-hands meeting, but he and Nina had remained aboard the Climber until they could be sure the nanos were quiescent. Back online, comms equipment shared the scene in high-res holo with the personnel aboard JoveCo Way Station—crowded into the station’s hold—and those assembled down on Ganymede.

  “We’ve inherited an incredible wealth of advanced tech,” Williams concluded, gesturing to the domes.

  “Nanofacturing infrastructure, AIs orders of magnitude more advanced than ours, and other systems we’ll spend years investigating. That’s JoveCo’s new core mission—not that we’ll cease hydrogen-mining operations. Stay practical.”

  Scattered chuckles.

  “I’ll open to questions,” Williams said. “What do we tackle first?”

  “Don,” Nina said, “you say JoveCo is ‘laying the flagstones for humankind to walk among the stars.’ That’s what drew Mike here, and I’d bet most others, too. You can now accomplish that, but only if you share this tech.”

  “You’d give it away,” Williams said.

  Nina overcame her instincts and ran a fingertip along the top of an alien dome. It felt smooth and tingly.

  “This tech can give us the stars, but only if we engage the collective capabilities of our entire species. Learning the science, engineering our own equipment, building starships—you’re powerful, but that’s beyond your ability.”

  Someone in the hologrammic crowd muttered.

  Nina looked out at them. “Even if we try to keep it all for yourselves, we won’t be able to. Some military corp will seize our intellectual property ‘for national defense,’ or a big fish will get greedy and knock us out of the pond. Such companies don’t have magnanimous leaders. Their vision is limited to stockholder profit. Going to the stars offers no guaranteed profits, so they’ll grow fat off something they didn’t even discover. They’ll scatter your dream. The only way to reach the stars is by making sure what we learn here belongs to everyone.”

  “I won’t let competitors take this tech,” Williams said.

  Nina put a hand on his shoulder and looked into his eyes. “You’re Don Williams,” she said. She gestured to the hologrammic crowd. “Everyone here signed onto your dream. Mike’s in a coma because he believes in you. Humankind will never reach the stars if you’re out to win the capitalism game. Your vision requires everyone working together. Even the aliens who left us these relics—who could create a pocket universe and live there for thousands of years—needed help to get free. Collectively, humankind is far more capable than one company.”

  “What do you propose?” Williams asked.

  “Offer exactly what you did when you set up JoveCo,” Nina said. “Make them all work for JoveCo to get their hands on this. They’ll accept your offer.”

  Williams smiled and winked at her.

  The bastard knew. She shook her head and took a long sip of the wine.

  Williams turne
d to the crowd. “How do you feel about inviting the entire human species to become shareholder-employees?” he asked.

  Muttering, then a cheer. Pretty soon everyone was talking at once.

  Williams turned to Nina. “Looks like we need to get busy hiring people,” he said. “But first we have a lot of patents to file.”

  Through the porthole beneath her feet, Jupiter reached full day. Down among those gigantic storms, billions of creatures floated, minds linked into a vast radio choir. A tiny fraction of the light that erupted from the Sun 40 minutes ago reflected off those clouds, and a tiny fraction of that found its way through windows into a little vessel at humankind’s remotest frontier. Three artifacts forged from pure information shone in that starlight, but not nearly so bright as the eyes of the men and women who gazed upon them.

  More than ever, Nina could hardly wait for Mike to wake.

  Chris McKitterick’s work has appeared in Analog, Artemis, Captain Proton, E-Scape, Extrapolation, Foundation, Aftermaths, Ad Astra, Locus, Mythic Circle, NOTA, Ruins: Extraterrestrial, Sentinels, Synergy: New Science Fiction, Tomorrow, various TSR publications, Visual Journeys, Westward Weird, a bowling poem anthology, and elsewhere.

  His debut novel, published by Hadley Rille Books, is Transcendence, and he recently finished another, Empire Ship. Current projects include The Galactic Adventures of Jack and Stella and a memoir, Stories from a Perilous Youth.

  Chris teaches writing and Science Fiction at the University of Kansas and succeeded James Gunn as Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. He also serves as juror for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best SF novel. He can be found online at Twitter, Facebook, and his Web site: www.christopher-mckitterick.com.

  And now we return to our own planet’s orbit as high school physics teacher Jay Werkheiser’s tale explores a race to be the first to visit a Near Earth Object . . .

  AROUND THE NEO

  IN 80 DAYS

  by Jay Werkheiser

  Dark Sky Station floated lazily over the equator like a hydrogen-filled silver starfish. It drifted through the mesosphere, as high as its buoyancy could lift it, where the sky above was the color of space and the hazy glow of the troposphere hugged the curvature of the Earth below. A habitat tube ran along the keel, tracing the mile-long inflated arms. Within, Felix awaited his prey.

  He sipped a bulb of coffee, intently watching through a porthole as a puffy v-shaped airship drifted closer. It kissed the base of DSS’s arm, a perfect soft docking. The clanging of airlock doors and a jumble of voices sounded from the pressure hatch a few yards away.

  Soon.

  He tried to focus on the incident report on his tablet—some newb on the construction crew forgot to depressurize before suiting up and got the bends—but his mind was on the hunt. And the money it would bring.

  The first man through the hatch was one of the most recognizable people on Earth—handlebar mustache, mutton chops, and unruly salt-and-pepper hair contrasting with a three-piece suit and white gloves. Phil Foggerty. Rich, eccentric, famous for being famous. “Be a good man and see to our arrangements,” Foggerty said in his faux haughty voice. “I’ll find my own way to my chamber.”

  The man following him said, “Of course, sir.” As soon as Foggerty disappeared through the hatch, the man collapsed into a chair across the aisle from Felix.

  Felix caught his eye. “First ascender flight?”

  The man nodded. “Wasn’t bad. A little rocking, but no worse than being at sea. It’s the next flight that has me worried.” He glanced up, as though he could see the black sky through the station’s skin.

  Felix suppressed a smile. “Oh, I didn’t know an orbital ascender was headed out tomorrow.” He always smiled when he lied.

  The man nodded, then stretched out a hand. “John Keyes.”

  “Detective Felix.”

  “Detective?”

  “Station this size, they need someone to keep an eye on things.”

  Keyes grunted. “I suppose so.”

  “So your boss is some kind of space tourist? Rich guy who wants to make a few orbits around the Earth?”

  “Not quite.”

  Felix could see that the story was itching to burst through Keyes’s lips, so he prodded it. “Oh? Where to, then?”

  “We’re going to be the first to go to a NEO.”

  “NEO?”

  “Near Earth object. Some tiny asteroid making a close approach soon.”

  “You’re going to land on it?”

  Keyes waved his hands, erasing the thought. “Oh, no. That’s much too difficult. We’re just going to swing around it, get some close-up pictures, and return home.”

  “Unmanned mission could do that faster and cheaper.”

  “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  Felix knew there was more to it than adventure. There was money on the line, big money, a fool’s bet that Foggerty could be the first person to make it to a NEO and back, with a time limit that expired in less than three months. A wager that Foggerty intended to win by cheating.

  And a nice chunk of change would go in Felix’s pocket if Foggerty missed the deadline. “I wish you a speedy journey, then,” he said with a smile.

  Keyes headed to the hub, where the station’s five arms converged, for the preflight briefing. He and Foggerty would be passengers, not crew or mission specialists, so there wasn’t much he needed to know. He abandoned his plan to explore after the briefing; the trip to the hub had shown him that there was nothing to see but an endless tube punctuated by frequent pressure hatches.

  He pressed his hand against the plastic wall. It felt like Mylar, rigid from air pressure. He ran his hand along the smooth surface, feeling the lightweight trusses supporting the tube. Same as the last compartment. And the one before that.

  He slipped through the hatch to the next compartment and found three crew members sleeping in their bunks. He sealed the hatch as silently as he could and tiptoed through the compartment. There was little privacy in DSS.

  Except for Foggerty, of course. The section of tube outward of his bunk stored meteorological instruments that rarely needed maintenance, affording him the closest thing to private chambers money could buy above the stratosphere.

  “Everything still on schedule?” Foggerty asked.

  “Indeed, sir. The ascender will be returning to DSS within the hour, then refueled and—”

  “Oh? I’d assumed we’d be using the one parked outside. Save the refueling time.”

  “I asked, sir. That one is still under construction,” Keyes said. “They only have one fully operational so far. Had to use it to get your extra fuel tank into orbit, and they’re already cutting their turnaround time short for you. I get the feeling they’re a bit miffed about it.”

  Foggerty chuckled. “Not the first time, my man.”

  “We’ll be boarding the orbital ascender at five a.m. GMT.” Keyes glanced at his phone. “That’s eleven hours from now.”

  “Good show. Timing is going to be critical. Just a little late and our orbit won’t intersect the NEO’s.”

  “Forgive my asking, sir, but are you sure this is safe? You’ve had minimal training, and I’ve had even less. Didn’t NASA used to spend months training their astronauts? Years, even?”

  “NASA no longer exists, now does it?”

  “But still—”

  “Tut. These airships are much safer than rockets, no heavy acceleration to deal with or fuel tanks to explode. It’s like riding a balloon to space. Who trains for balloon rides?”

  Keyes huffed, but knew further discussion was pointless. “Now there’s something I don’t understand,” he said, switching gears. “How is it we can ride a balloon to space? There’s no air!”

  “But there is, a good way up anyway, just not much of it.”

  Keyes frowned. “I guess I just don’t understand it.”

  “Look,” Foggerty said, a devilish smile spreading from mutton chop to mutton chop, “buoyanc
y depends on the weight of air displaced, right? So if you make your airship bigger, you displace more air and get more buoyancy.”

  Keyes nodded slowly. “That’s why they made the airship so big.”

  “Biggest airship ever built, by far. Over a mile long. They had to build it up here; it would never survive the winds down in the troposphere.”

  “Even so, you’ll eventually reach a point where there’s no air, and then no amount of buoyancy can help.”

  “True enough. Buoyancy can only lift the ascender to about two hundred thousand feet. Then they turn on thrusters, some sort of chemical/electric hybrid, and push the rest of the way to orbit.”

  “And all the way out to the near-Earth asteroid.”

  “Well, they use up most of their fuel just to reach orbit,” Foggerty said. “I had to pay good money to lob that refueling tanker up there. The company’s not thrilled with having to do a docking maneuver on short notice, but I spread enough money around to bring the thrill back.” His grin widened.

  Keyes shook his head. He knew it was pointless to ask why Foggerty would spend more on this venture than he stood to win, and pledge the winnings to space research at that. He turned and gazed through the compartment’s porthole at the curve of the Earth below, mostly cloud-dotted ocean with a sliver of land rising over the horizon, all shrouded in the blue glow of the atmosphere. The question answered itself.

  Felix had done his research long before Foggerty had arrived on the station. Foggerty was a deep sleeper, difficult to wake in the morning. Felix’s tablet chimed, alerting him that Foggerty’s phone had connected to DSS’s wireless network and that Felix’s software had cracked its security.

  The data files were encrypted, of course, with coding that would take centuries to crack. But routine functions were not. Felix opened Foggerty’s clock app and disabled its alarm function. He implanted a bit of code in the phone that would send a message to mission control an hour before launch.