Kepler concentrated on the fire again. It transformed before his eyes. He saw a burning bush of flowers. The flames weren’t rooted in wooden branches, but in countless small, pale worms, which didn’t seem to be bothered by the heat. Now Kepler knew whose fantasy they were in. It was the Herbae who had drawn him in. They seemed to be contented, perhaps even happy. And he sensed gratitude washing over everything. It was a warm feeling in which he could bathe, because it was devoted to him. But there was also a significant difference this time. Kepler wasn’t receiving any articulated thoughts from the Herbae. They seemed to have become mute.
Something bumped into his upper arm. Kepler looked up.
Zhenyi laughed. A small stone rolled across the ground. She must have thrown it. “You were so lost in thought,” she said.
“It’s beautiful here,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Why can’t they speak?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t been here much longer than you. Puppy?”
The butler’s reaction was delayed. He opened his eyes very slowly, as though waking up from a trance. Can an AI go into a trance? Kepler wondered. Apparently.
“Excuse me,” said the butler. “I was... lost in thought. What was the question?”
“Why can’t we speak with the Herbae?” asked Kepler.
“You think too quickly. There aren’t enough of them yet to converse with you. The Herbae are developing their collective consciousness, but for that they need more individuals than there currently are. Individually they only have instinctive intelligence.”
“And maybe not even that anymore,” said Kepler.
“Because they no longer retreat? That was a conscious decision.”
“Was that smart?”
“That will only become clear with hindsight,” said the butler. “This planet, with its existing flora, was a shock for them. They had been the only species on their old planet for billions of cycles, and now they’ve encountered thousands of plant species.”
“They could have overwhelmed them, as they must have done on their home planet.”
“But they didn’t want to. The diversity fascinated them. They decided to absorb the most interesting traits of the other species into their gene pool. That delayed their expansion.”
“So that’s why the grass looks so different,” Kepler commented.
“Yes, they gave up a few abilities that didn’t seem important to them anymore.”
“And what did they get?”
“You’ve already seen that, Johannes,” replied the butler.
“The flowers.”
“Yes, aren’t they beautiful?” asked Zhenyi.
Not as beautiful as you, Kepler thought. “They really are,” he said.
“They started fifteen hundred cycles ago with an unremarkable, white flower,” explained the butler. “I’ve followed every stage. At first we could hardly communicate at all, but they were already experimenting with colors and shapes. Now they can bloom in any hue or form they choose. For the Herbae, this is unimaginably valuable. I only understand them because I’ve been listening to them continuously for many years.”
“And what happened to their abilities as a quantum computer?” asked Kepler.
The butler laughed. “From their point of view, it only brought them misfortune.”
“So we can’t make use of it when the next catastrophe looms?”
“Oh, Kepler,” said Zhenyi. “We’ve only just rescued the universe. The next catastrophe will be the inevitable end of the universe, and no one can protect us from that. But until then we’ll have a few happy gigacycles ahead of us, I hope.”
Kepler moved his head slowly from side to side. He admired Zhenyi’s optimism, but he would have felt better if he knew they had the incredible computing power of the Herbae behind them. How he hoped no one in this universe would get any stupid ideas! It would be such a waste of the wonderful flowers here, including Zhenyi.
Cycle GN 4.1, Gigadyson
“And...? Does it suit me?”
Valentina held the dress up to her shoulders with both hands. The fabric flowed across her body. Then she turned around a few times in front of the mirror.
Ada nodded. Her girlfriend wasn’t slender, but the dress suited her. The fabric with its pattern of dark vertical lines accentuated her feminine curves. Valentina had made the dress herself. Ada couldn’t comprehend why she didn’t simply get the fabricators to do it, but she still admired the way Valentina worked so patiently on it—she had even woven the fabric herself. The only thing she’d had made by the nanomachines was the sewing thread.
“How long have you been working on it now?”
“Don’t you think it’s pretty? I was hoping you’d like it,” she asked, batting her long lashes. Valentina stopped moving, took the dress away from her shoulders and held it in front of her belly. Then she shook her long, dark locks, which fell over her shoulders.
Ada had to laugh. They understood each other well. “Yes, I really like it. But I’d love to see you wearing it, instead of always just trying it out.”
“It’ll be finished by our anniversary, I promise,” said Valentina.
Oh, that’s right, Ada thought. She quickly smoothed her facial expression. Our anniversary! It was only two days away. She would have to think of some sort of surprise. But what?
Three hundred years ago, when the Convention had offered the two of them the job of maintaining the Gigadyson as a team, they had finally been able to make the transition from a long-distance relationship to spending every day together. The first few years had been wild. There wasn’t much to do on their engineering ship, the Mario. The Sphere mostly maintained itself with the help of the numerous autonomous units. Only occasionally was it necessary to manually intervene. But that meant they had to entertain themselves every hour of every day. At first they’d made the most of this by spending it in the bedroom, but then they realized that Ada Lovelace and Valentina Tereshkova also needed their own lives.
At that point Valentina had taken up sewing. If they met other people, which seldom happened, she gave away her creations as gifts, to make way for new ones she designed.
Ada had begun writing obituaries—not for people but for stars. The quasar enclosed in the Gigadyson had granted humanity some respite, but the time for goodbyes had already arrived. At least in the Milky Way, there were almost no new stars at all. Ada sought out very special exemplars—ones that pulsed, ones that were particularly large or small, or stars that had gathered unusual planet families around them—and she wrote their biographies. She enjoyed researching the necessary information. She had even managed to gain access to the Terra memory stores. The new Secretary of the Convention, Maria Sybille Merian, had liked her obituaries so much that she’d authorized the new Guardian of Terra to answer any of Ada’s questions.
If only Terra wasn’t so far away! Then she could ask the Guardian for help with her current problem of what surprise to prepare for Valentina. Unfortunately, she didn’t have time to wait 20,000 cycles for the answer.
“Approaching the target area,” the automated system announced.
It was about time, too. Ada was glad not to have to think about the anniversary anymore. She stood up. With her two left arms, she cleared the table she had just been sitting at, wiped it down with the lower right sleeve, and zipped up her light-weight pressure suit with the upper right. If they really were about to find something, which Ada didn’t believe they would, then they’d have to be prepared for zero gravity. It would be impractical to have coffee cups and cake crumbs floating around the cabin. “Don’t forget your suit, Valja.”
“What?” Valentina lifted her head, as though coming out of a trance.
“Your suit!” said Ada.
“Oh yeah, thanks.” Ada’s girlfriend turned and left the room. She had probably left her pressure suit in the bedroom.
Ada sat down on her lounger seat and buckled herself in. The back wall of the cabin, which Val
entina had used as a mirror, transformed into a large window at her command. Ada had the momentary impression that she was sitting on a terrace. In front of her was nothing but the blackness of space. She programmed the sensor, using both left hands, and zoomed in on the Dyson sphere with the right. The picture became much brighter. There were the usual honeycombs. A structural analysis with the gamma spectrometer showed that the shell was wholly stable here. Whatever might have happened, it wasn’t having any effect on the Gigadyson. And it would have been surprising if it had.
Le Corbusier, its chief designer, was convinced that the mighty sphere was indestructible. Ada considered that arrogant, but she also couldn’t imagine the mere disappearance of an autonomous unit leading to a catastrophe. Still, they’d agreed to comply and investigate the incident. Autonomous units were always going missing, but ZT34, which they were on the trail of, had recently received a message about a particular incident and must have been there at the time to investigate it. At least, that’s what YK19 had testified to.
“What’s up?” asked Valentina, coming over to stand next to her.
Ada looked up at her girlfriend. She was wearing a light-weight pressure suit and holding a toolbox in her hand. Ada smiled. It was maybe a bit too early for that. Valentina was in fact an engineer. She’d have to repair the damage if they found any. But they hadn’t gotten that far yet. Ada took the box out of her hand with her lower left arm and reached out to Valentina with her upper left. It was good to feel her warm skin. She was so soft, in a way that Ada would never have thought possible for a biological body, with all its inherent symptoms of decline.
Valentina never even used cream, while Ada had to regularly treat her artificial body with a tech-fluid so that its surfaces remained supple. Whenever Ada complained to her girlfriend about it, Valentina suggested changing back to a biological body, but Ada was done with that, ever since the time that...
An alarm sounded, a shrill tone. Ada’s ten left fingers deactivated the warning signal. Her right hands searched for the source. What was exciting the automated system to make it react with this ugly sound?
“You’d better sit down, Valja.”
She let go of Valentina’s hand. Quick as lightning she went through the various sensors. But there was nothing. The honeycomb structure was undamaged. But there... the gravitational detectors were displaying unusual values. Ada let the Mario drift a bit closer, then she matched their speed to the rotation of the sphere.
“Can you see anything?” she asked.
“Everything looks completely normal,” said Valentina.
“But the gravitational data?”
“Yeah, I can see that. There’s only one possibility. There’s something down there that we can’t see.”
“No, Valja, you’re interpreting the scale wrong. There isn’t something down there that we can’t see, there’s something there that we can’t believe we’re seeing.”
“Huh? I have an IQ of 135; please explain.”
“The gravitational force of the sphere directly below us is slightly lower than it should be. Someone must have removed part of the outer shell.”
“What for?” asked Valentina.
“I don’t know. Maybe whoever did it needed the material for their own purposes.”
“No way. They could have produced some with nano-fabricators at any time. But look at the honeycomb structure, it looks completely intact.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Maybe it was deliberate. No one was supposed to notice the manipulation. We only came here because the autonomous unit disappeared suddenly.”
“What could the motive be?”
“Just get me down there, Ada, and I’ll take a look at it up close.”
Cycle GN 4.2, Gigadyson
The spaceship appeared to be suspended just below a completely stationary sphere. Valentina hooked her safety line onto the anchorage near the airlock. The multipurpose instrument on her wrist betrayed the fact that the tranquility was deceptive. The shell of the Gigadyson was rotating at an unbelievable speed, and her ship, the Mario, was precisely keeping pace. If there had been air in space, there would be a hurricane raging around them. But to Valentina, everything looked quiet and peaceful.
She unclipped the line, pushing herself off and drifting upward. It was magical. The thrusters on her backpack accelerated her. The more she stretched her arms upward, the faster she moved. It must have looked like she was greeting a god in the sky, and then making her way up because he’d summoned her. But humanity had long since scouted every nook and cranny where a god might have resided.
Ada still believed in a higher power. That wasn’t a problem for Valentina, even though she wasn’t a believer herself. But it was strange. Ada of all people, who had for so long relinquished her natural body in favor of a special construction made by bioengineers, was attracted to the idea of a being that was outside the reach of human scientific inquiry.
Valentina looked up. The distance was greater than it had looked at first. The human mind couldn’t comprehend the enormous dimensions of the Gigadyson. It was an ellipsoid, but from her perspective its shell looked like a straight wall reaching to infinity. Their spaceship, a ninety-niner, was infinitesimal by comparison, and she herself was like a speck of dust, no, an atom.
The instrument on her arm vibrated. She needed to brake. Valentina pivoted 180 degrees. Now the wall wasn’t above her, it was below her. She was relieved. Humans were used to standing on large surfaces. The thrusters braked her descent. She sank slowly toward the metal surface. She waved to Ada, who was watching her from the Mario.
The thrusters set her down on the structure incredibly gently. Valentina absorbed the remaining momentum with her knees. The light on her helmet cast a wide beam. She was standing in the middle of one of the honeycombs. It wasn’t the first time Valentina had landed on the surface of the Gigadyson. But it was still a strange feeling, especially because she knew what was inside—a super-massive black hole, an active galactic nucleus, also known as a quasar. The object gave off enough energy to supply all of humanity for many more gigacycles. And the shell that surrounded it, on which she was currently standing, was only 30 meters thick.
“Everything okay down there?” asked Ada.
“Yes, thanks, I’m fine. I just need a moment to acclimatize.”
“I understand. Can you see anything yet?” Ada was always in a rush.
Valentina smiled. She’d had the urge to kiss her at a time when she was still wondering whether she was even attracted to women at all.
But now something grabbed her attention. Yes, there was something there. It was undeniable. “Everything looks like new down here,” she said.
“Well, the sphere isn’t that old.”
“Brand spanking new. The honeycombs don’t have even the slightest scratch, not a single one. That’s impossible, unless they’ve been covered up the whole time.”
“Or someone’s planed them off,” Ada suggested.
“Maybe an autonomous unit? Was there a big asteroid impact here? Maybe this section has been repaired.”
“There’s nothing about that in the service database.”
Valentina sighed. What had happened here? The sphere was obviously not damaged, so nothing that bad could have happened. But she’d probably still have to search the surface for days on end, just to find some trace that would end up leading nowhere.
“Can’t we just cross it off the list?” she asked. “Everything’s fine here.” But even as she spoke, she knew it wasn’t true. Someone must have repaired the honeycomb here. There was no other explanation for this virgin surface. And she wanted to know how it had come to be.
“And the disappeared autonomous unit?” asked Ada.
Yes, she also had to investigate the disappearance. “You’re right. I’ll have a thorough look around,” Valentina agreed.
The walls of the honeycomb structure were about two meters high. They rose almost vertically, but that wasn�
�t a challenge for Valentina. The sphere exerted practically no gravity, so Valentina could easily leap over them. To reach the ground again, she used the thrusters on her back. She took a ground sample from every second segment, measuring the thickness of the material. She would be able to analyze the samples back on the ship.
About 50 centimeters was consistently missing from the surface of the structure. That definitely wouldn’t be noticeable from a distance. And it wasn’t a large proportion of its total thickness of 30 meters. But what was surprising was the extent of the area that had been tampered with. That must have taken someone quite a lot of effort. But why?
“It looks the same everywhere,” said Valentina via her helmet radio.
“Yeah, it looks that way to me, too.”
“What else can I do here?”
“The standard procedure...”
Of course. The maintenance regulations stated that she must inspect the surface on both sides. But she really didn’t feel like climbing down into the vault. It wouldn’t achieve anything. It was inefficient and she hated inefficiency.
“Do I have to, Ada?”
“If we don’t stick to the regulations, then we’ll lose the contract. The new Secretary of the Convention is uncompromising.”
That would clearly create a problem. They enjoyed traveling around in their spaceship. As long as they had the contract with the Convention, they could fill their tanks with dark matter at its expense. The prices had risen by 50 percent in the last century. And neither she nor Ada had large asset reserves.
“Yeah, you’re right. I’m on my way,” replied Valentina.
The next maintenance shaft was 1.5 kilometers away. She was still in the area where the surface had been removed. Valentina was curious. What might have happened to the shaft? Surely this would have exposed it?
The Death of the Universe: Ghost Kingdom: Hard Science Fiction (Big Rip Book 2) Page 2