The Death of the Universe: Ghost Kingdom: Hard Science Fiction (Big Rip Book 2)

by Brandon Q Morris

  “I’m not so sure about that,” said Zhenyi. “We’ll have to discuss it. I still don’t know if we even need the two of you. But it’s good that you’re here. At least you can’t hinder our efforts anymore.”

  “We? Who’s ‘we’? And what do you mean by ‘the two of you’?”

  Zhenyi declined to answer, only shaking her head. As she did so, she glanced quickly at the wall next to him. Kepler followed her eyes. Why hadn’t he noticed that before? To his left hung a second robot. Could that be the butler?

  Zhenyi turned around and left the room without a word. Seeing his beloved again had gone quite differently from how he’d imagined it.

  The overhead lights went out after she shut the door. But that wasn’t a problem. As a robot, Kepler could see in the dark. He looked at the second robot that hung on the wall to his left. It was the same model as his, so it clearly wasn’t the butler. Maybe someone had followed him and searched for him wearing the same type of robot. In that case there was only one human it could be—Zhenyi. But hadn’t he just been talking to her? Something wasn’t right, and he was going to find out what.

  Or was he overestimating himself again? He was still hanging, immobile, from the wall. His arms were clamped in steel cuffs. He could stretch them out, but no other movement was possible.

  Wait a minute. The robot next to him looked undamaged. Had it just been drained of power? In his last few seconds on the Gigadyson, he recalled, his own power had been rapidly drained. Had they decommissioned his neighbor in the same way?

  Kepler stretched out his left arm experimentally. Yes, it was enough. He could reach the other robot’s right arm so that their fingertips met. He called up his own construction schematics. The connections in the fingertips could be reconfigured. Not only could they transfer data on command, but power too, and it would be enough to charge the batteries of the other robot. For some reason, the strange Zhenyi had only activated his body. Kepler was excited. Was there hope? Of course, it could just be a dumb robot next to him, but then why would they have restrained it on the wall?

  He initiated the power transfer. Nothing was visible from the outside, but he could feel the power flowing from his batteries through his spine and arm and into the other robot.

  Its hand jerked and the connection was severed. The machine next to him appeared to have woken up.

  “It’s me, Kepler,” he said.

  “You’ve got no idea how happy I am that I’ve found you.” It’s Zhenyi! He felt his temperature rise, although his sensors didn’t measure anything.

  “Fantastic,” he said. “I had hoped it would work, but I couldn’t be sure it really would. But it was actually our mutual enemies you found, not me.”

  “Enemies?”

  “Haven’t you noticed you’re fixed to the wall?”

  Her limbs flinched, but she couldn’t free herself. “Shit,” she said.

  “At least we’ve found each other.”

  “Who knows for how long? I’m almost out of power.”

  “Stretch out your right arm, then I can give you some more of mine.”

  “Did you wake me up somehow?”

  “Yes, dearest, that was me, shortly after Zhenyi left the room.”

  “Zhenyi? I don’t understand the sentence.”

  “There’s a woman here who looks like you in your human form. Zhenyi. Maybe she stole your body—you left it behind at the base, after all.”

  “I did, but no one can get to it, and the flight alone would have taken weeks.”

  “You don’t know how long we’ve been hanging here.”

  “That’s true. The power drain seems to have reset the robot’s system time. According to that, we’re quite far back in the past.”

  “Which is impossible. Stretch out your hand so I can recharge you.”

  “Okay. But do you realize how strange it sounds, what we’re saying?”

  “I do, Zhenyi. But that’s nothing compared to the fact that you obviously have a doppelganger.”

  Unknown cycle 0.1, unknown location

  The door opened. Zhenyi drummed his hand, but he’d already noticed. They’d tried to free themselves from their restraints the day before, but to no avail. They’d agreed that Zhenyi should pretend she was still hanging on the wall drained of power. They hoped that at some point she might be taken down without them realizing she had her full strength.

  The other Zhenyi entered the room. She had the same allure for him that he was used to. And it was no wonder. It was still the body of the woman he loved.

  “Sleep well?” she asked.

  “Not bad,” he replied.

  She seemed to be in a better mood than she had been yesterday. She slowly came closer. She tapped something against his chest. A status display appeared in his field of view. She was obviously calling up his data.

  “Your battery is emptying faster than expected,” she said.

  Does she suspect something? he wondered. “Maybe some kind of current leakage,” he said, “or the consequences of the rapid loss of energy in the maintenance shaft. Batteries don’t much like that. How did you do it?”

  “You’ll find out soon, Kepler.”

  “When?”

  “I still don’t know.”

  Zhenyi stood next to him in the space between him and the other robot. She opened a flap on his body. She must be checking the batteries. Kepler could see the robot next to him stretching its arm out. Zhenyi was peering inside his body and didn’t notice. He had an idea of what the robot Zhenyi was trying to do. If she stretched her arm out fully, she could strike out with her hand and give the woman next to him a blow. If she was lucky, she’d hit her in the neck. But would that achieve anything? Kepler shook his head imperceptibly. Getting the imposter Zhenyi out of the way wouldn’t help them if they were still left hanging on the wall.

  The robot’s hand struck. The biological Zhenyi let out a cry, flew half-way across the room, and landed on the floor. But she wasn’t dead. She was holding her head in both hands. Her cry seemed to have alerted someone.

  A man came running into the room, rushing over to Zhenyi and taking her in his arms. “What happened, darling?” he asked.

  “Nothing, Kepler. I just wasn’t paying attention. But everything is progressing well.”

  Unknown cycle 0.2, unknown location

  Kepler had learned something new. Robots could have back pain. It must have been the unusual posture. The artificial muscles in his upper arms hadn’t been able to return to their default position for two days. They were now issuing an alarm so that he’d do something about it—which his consciousness must be interpreting as pain. But Kepler didn’t have to endure the pain for long, he could just switch off the warnings.

  Zhenyi stretched her fingers out. He looked over at her. “Have they forgotten us?” he asked.

  “Maybe they’re waiting for orders from above,” said Zhenyi.

  “From their accomplices, you mean?”

  “Yes, the Secretary implied as much.”

  “Zhenyi, I need to apologize to you.”

  Zhenyi laughed. “Because of that cheap copy of me?”

  “I was afraid you were in cahoots with the criminals. Of course I didn’t think you’d do anything like that, but a probe had photographed you. Your double, I mean.”

  “You still should have talked to me.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re right, of course. But if you really had been the thief, you wouldn’t have admitted it.”

  “Definitely not. I understand your dilemma, which is why I’m not upset with you. I probably wouldn’t have handled things any differently.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you still believe this is about theft, Johannes?”

  “No. That’s just a cover. I took seismic measurements of the surface. They’ve been systematically removing material to alter the structure of the Gigadyson. Someone’s trying to destroy humanity’s project.”

  “By taking such little scrapings? Wouldn’t it
be easier just to explode a piece off it?”

  “The Gigadyson is constructed in such a way that a small hole wouldn’t cause it to burst right away. It’s not a balloon. An asteroid can still slip through the monitoring network and hit the sphere. That simply gets repaired. End of story.”

  “So they’re scraping the egg at multiple points, so that it collapses everywhere at once and can’t be repaired.”

  “No, Zhenyi. They’re upsetting the balance of the Gigadyson. The alterations are causing an imbalance, which is increasing over time, until the structure can no longer be sustained. It’s been ingeniously planned. They’ve been able to work on this for a long time without anyone noticing. I’m betting they’ve already removed material from multiple locations. But once the process is properly underway, it can’t be stopped. We’d have to intervene at multiple places at once, which would be pretty much impossible.”

  “An interesting theory, but who are they?”

  “The two people that were here in the room yesterday and who look like us? They must be clones.”

  “No, I mean the ones behind it all.”

  “I have no idea. Maybe we’ll find out in the next few days.”

  “Whatever happens, we have to assume they’re monitoring our communication.”

  That had occurred to Kepler, too. They needed a way of talking without their kidnappers listening in.

  Zhenyi tapped him with the second finger of her outstretched right hand. He turned to look at her. She was smiling. Or grimacing. It was hard to tell with robot faces. He smiled back. Lucky he didn’t have to see his own face as he did so. Was that why Zhenyi was laughing? At least the effect wasn’t scary, it seemed.

  His second finger tingled where his girlfriend had touched it. Kepler looked at Zhenyi, but she wasn’t giving anything away. He called up his circuit schematics. There was a small input terminal on the fingertip. He had used it to donate some of his energy to Zhenyi the day before yesterday. Was she trying to give some of it back? That wasn’t necessary. The kidnappers had plugged them both into the power grid yesterday.

  He was about to pull his hand back, but then he noticed that the power Zhenyi was transmitting was changing over time. Of course! She was encoding something in it. These robot bodies were very practical. Kepler had already considered vibrating something on his body so quickly that a human wouldn’t notice it. But he would have had to explain the process to Zhenyi, and that wouldn’t have worked without communication.

  He analyzed the power fluctuations. They had six clearly distinguishable levels—so, a six-character code. Kepler quickly designed a script, an automatically executing command sequence that converted the six-character code into an ASCII sequence. That was the first mode of communication that occurred to him—the language of letters and numbers. And he recognized a pattern.

  “...ove you. I l...”

  Well, that was a nice message Zhenyi was sending him. He copied it and sent it back through his third finger.

  “It’s working,” she replied in the electronic language.

  “Good idea,” he replied. “We just need to try to prevent our kidnappers from noticing that we’re constantly holding hands.”

  “But we’re in love,” said Zhenyi.

  “So how do we proceed?” asked Kepler.

  “As we’re currently hanging immobile on the wall, we have no choice but to let the others make the next move. I’m sure it will come. Otherwise they could have easily destroyed us.”

  “We need your help.”

  The person who was speaking, who looked like Zhenyi, was standing in the middle of the room. She really must be a clone, the similarity was so remarkable. But the demeanor and movements had also been copied. This Zhenyi put her hands on her hips in precisely the same way as his Zhenyi, and sometimes she blew her black hair out of her face. The clone must have been trained using publicly-available recordings. So much effort! And for what? Maybe they were about to find out.

  “You have a strange way of asking for help. I’ve never hung someone on a wall to do that,” said Zhenyi.

  Kepler let her do the talking. She excelled in these kinds of situations.

  “For a variety of reasons, I was left with no choice. Your bodies are very strong. You would have overpowered me immediately. When I think about the box on the ear I got yesterday...”

  “They should have equipped your clones with a few muscles,” said Zhenyi.

  “You’re wrong, I’m not a clone.”

  “Oh, you’re my twin sister that I never knew I had.”

  “If you like—yes. In fact we’re much more than genetic twins, we’re completely identical in terms of our physical containers.”

  Zhenyi didn’t answer. She was probably considering what the other Zhenyi meant by that. And it hardly made sense. If it wasn’t just a bluff, then they—whoever they were—had clearly committed one of the most serious crimes.

  The silence was palpable. The fake Zhenyi seemed to be deliberately giving them time to take it in. But if it was true, then there was no fake Zhenyi at all—there were two real ones.

  “You can’t be that insane,” said Zhenyi finally.

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” said the other Zhenyi.

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “Should I tell you a few stories from your youth that even Kepler doesn’t know?”

  “You could have researched those in Terra’s memory archive.”

  “We didn’t touch your consciousness backups.”

  “How are you supposed to have duplicated me then?”

  “In a very targeted way. When you transferred yourselves via laser pulse to the control station, a semi-permeable mirror captured your data.”

  “But that would have been registered by the control station. The strength of the pulse signal must have been lower than expected.”

  “Correct. And the station did register it. I can play the data back to you.”

  “That can all be faked. Send us back there, so I can form a clear picture myself.”

  “Nice try,” said the fake Zhenyi.

  She would always be the fake Zhenyi to Kepler, no matter how real she looked. The real Zhenyi was hanging next to him. It was strange. She was stuck in a body that was ugly by human standards, but he empathized with her, and he viewed her as the person he knew and loved. On the other hand, the apparently human creature that stood before him was repellant to him. Yesterday it had been different. Was that because he now knew how she had come to exist? If everything this Zhenyi was saying was true... They had to find a way to separate fiction and reality.

  “If we’re going to help you, we need to know more,” said Zhenyi.

  “You will know more, I promise.”

  “Then tell us first of all why you need our help.”

  “To be precise, it’s you who need our help. You just don’t know it yet.”

  “For what?”

  “It has to do with preventing the Milky Way from collapsing.”

  “Of course, I should have thought of that myself! And presumably the problem is that the Milky Way isn’t collapsing.”

  “That’s what you think. But if we don’t act, the galaxy will die.”

  “And how are we supposed to prevent that together?”

  “By destroying the sphere that surrounds the quasar at the center of the galaxy.”

  “I understand. That sounds very efficient. Of course we’ll be happy to help you with that.”

  The human Zhenyi didn’t answer. She probably couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. Kepler felt the same. His dear Zhenyi must have meant it sarcastically.

  Or has she really just promised to work with the enemies of humanity?

  Unknown cycle 0.3, unknown location

  “I hate hanging here on the wall,” Zhenyi said to him via the electrical connection in their fingers. “Don’t you? Think about it. There’s only one way to end this situation—we have to act as though we’re cooperating. As long a
s we keep antagonizing them, they’ll leave us hanging here. Then they might as well dispose of us. At least, that’s how I would proceed if I were the other Zhenyi.”

  “If what she says is true, then you are.”

  “Also true. All the more reason for us to appear to be cooperative.”

  “You’re right. I’m regretting more and more not having talked to you before. We might have to exist in these robot bodies for months yet. I don’t even remember what it feels like to have a mouthful of wine, or to bite a strawberry.”

  “The sooner we find something out, the faster we can stop these lunatics, and the sooner we’ll be back in our bodies on K2-288b.”

  ‘These lunatics,’ Zhenyi had called them. Were they really so insane? The other Zhenyi seemed astonishingly calm and collected to him, almost as though she had a fully-fledged plan in the back of her mind that gave her confidence. They had planned their manipulations of the Gigadyson perfectly.

  “She didn’t seem all that insane to me,” said Kepler.

  “They want to explode the Gigadyson,” Zhenyi replied. “If that’s not insane, I don’t know what is. If that happens and there’s no announcement, the explosion will cost a lot of lives, and without the sphere, humanity’s energy provisions are endangered. Our survival as a species will be threatened.”

  “If the Gigadyson goes out of balance, it won’t go unnoticed. Anyone within the danger zone would have enough time to get to safety before the explosion.”

  “Fine. Then it’s not about the highest number of explosion victims for them, it’s about robbing humanity of a future. Very reassuring. And they call that rescuing the Milky Way?”

  Was Zhenyi right? Kepler brooded. He hated dilemmas. If the others really were like them, then they weren’t lying. That would mean it was actually about protecting the Milky Way from some evil that its inhabitants were unaware of. But maybe that had just been a pretext to motivate them to cooperate. That’s what Zhenyi seemed to believe. In that case, the two humans that looked like them must be evil versions of themselves. But they’d only find that out if they got involved. Which was why Zhenyi had agreed to it.