Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  “Miss Blackensmith?”

  Nicole turned, then realized that she hadn’t told anyone in the pod her last name. A young woman in a dark blue uniform approached her. The uniform was too big, and it bunched up in odd places.

  “Miss Blackensmith,” the woman repeated. The voice didn’t sound female, maybe the officer was male. “We will go to a private waiting area. Your parents—”

  “I’m fine staying with the group,” Nicole interrupted. “No need for special treatment.”

  “Me too,” Tommy added, finally starting to perk up. “Special treatment.”

  Nicole walked with the rest of the group, carrying Tommy piggyback. The officer followed her. The hallway opened into an open chamber. A few people gathered near a large window with sweeping views of the planet below, but everyone else went to the arrival screens. The data on the screens was much the same as the feed that Nicole had watched on her implants back on Earth, listing the status of all the latest pods. Nicole tried to establish a connection, but her access codes from Baine didn’t work here on the station.

  Nicole saw Sorna and Christopher studying the arrival screens. The old woman leaned against her walker with one arm and hugged her grandson with the other. The other pod, the one with the rest of their family, hadn’t made it.

  It was one thing to know that not every pod went through, but Nicole had seen those people. She tried to call up their faces in her memory, but she only remembered one, Christopher’s father. The boy who had been stoic and surly the entire trip was sobbing. She wanted to say something, but she didn’t know what to say. He probably wouldn’t have wanted to hear it from her anyway, even if she could come up with the words.

  “Miss Blackensmith, you must come with me now.”

  Nicole spent the night with Tommy in one of the station’s private waiting rooms. Her parents had needed time to settle their affairs on Earth, and Mom sent firm instructions that they were not to leave their room. Nicole wanted to explore the station, but given the amount of trouble she was already in, she stayed put.

  “I’m bored,” Tommy said.

  Nicole didn’t answer. Tommy had declared his boredom once every two minutes for the last half hour. Nicole gave him a game cube from her purse, but he wasn’t interested unless Nicole played too, and she wasn’t in the mood to entertain. Mom and Dad were on their way, which was exactly what she’d wanted, but after seeing that the other pod—the pod full of people she’d seen with her own eyes—hadn’t made it, she couldn’t help but worry.

  The waiting room windows were pointed away from the planet, and Nicole could see the region of sky where pods appeared. The tail of the worm, the white hole. The place where the worm would shit out her parents.

  Farther in the distance was the mouth of the Earthbound worm. A pod, probably empty since so few people actually travelled back to Earth, disappeared into the black hole.

  A few seconds later, a different pod exploded into existence, re-entering the universe in a bright flash of fire. The pod decelerated as it approached the station. The first few times it had been interesting to watch, but a couple hundred pods had come and they were still waiting.

  “Can we go home now?” Tommy asked.

  Nicole shook her head. She pulled the mini-mint cube out from her purse. It looked much the same as it had on Earth, unaffected by the lower gravity of the station. Somewhere in the red and orange clouds below the station, Grant was getting settled into his new home. Would he want the plant now that she was here? She couldn’t believe it was only the day before yesterday that they’d been arguing over the plant back on Earth.

  The door to the waiting room opened.

  “Daddy!” Nicole and Tommy cried out in unison. She let Tommy down, and he wobbled over to Dad and glommed onto his leg.

  “Where’s Mom?” Nicole asked, peering into the hallway behind Dad. “I know she’s probably really mad, but—”

  “Rosaline isn’t here?”

  Nicole shook her head.

  “She said it would be better. With the statistics. We had to come separately. I told her to take the first pod. I should have gone first.”

  “Mommy?” Tommy asked, hesitant. He started to cry, agitated by Dad’s lack of composure. Nicole couldn’t process what was happening. They were here to start their better life, with gorgeous sky views of orange clouds and aureliads. Mom would come around to the idea eventually.

  “No, Tommy, Mommy can’t be here.”

  Mom had tried to come. She was against the whole thing from the start, but she’d still tried to come, once she knew that Nicole and Tommy were here.

  “This a bad place,” Tommy said. “I want to go home.”

  “Shut up, Tommy.”

  “Nicole—”

  “Shut up!” Nicole was frantic, angry. This wasn’t how it was supposed to work. Mom was supposed to yell at them, to tell her what a stupid reckless thing she’d done. She couldn’t be dead. Mom would never get on a pod and risk becoming wormfood. She was on Earth, she had to be, fretting and worrying like always.

  Nicole could almost convince herself, until she looked at Dad’s face. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “I wish you’d been more patient, is all. If you’d given me a little more time I might have convinced her, and we could have all come together.” He picked up Tommy, who was calling for Mom as if he could magically summon her by repeating her name.

  They took the shuttle to one of the floating cities. Dawn Treader. Mom would have enjoyed the ride, in spite of herself. The orange sky was cut with shifting bands of blood-red aurora, streaks of color where the radiation from the Crab Nebula was blocked by the atmosphere of Opilio.

  They descended into the swirling storms, and the shuttle bounced and shook. Underneath the more turbulent layers were the floating cities, hazy in the distance. The shuttle pilot pointed to something, off to the right.

  “Aureliad,” Tommy whispered.

  It was rusty orange like the sky, and as big as the floating cities. The aureliad drifted in the currents of the sky, tentacles trailing behind it for miles. It swept the sky for planktos, tangling its prey in its tentacles like the jellyfish from which it got its name.

  Nicole clutched her tiny mint plant, safe inside its cube. She was supposed to give the mint to Grant, but if she could find a place to do it, she would use the tiny plant to start a garden for Mom.

  SEVEN WONDERS OF A ONCE AND FUTURE WORLD

  The Colossus of Mars

  Mei dreamed of a new Earth. She took her telescope onto the balcony of her North Philadelphia apartment and pointed it east, at the sky above the Trenton Strait, hoping for a clear view of Mars. Tonight the light pollution from Jersey Island wasn’t as bad as usual, and she was able to make out the ice caps and the dark shadow of Syrtis Major. Mei knew exactly where the science colony was, but the dome was too small to observe with her telescope.

  Much as she loved to study Mars, it could never be her new Earth. It lacked sufficient mass to be a good candidate for terraforming. The initial tests of the auto-terraforming protocol were proceeding nicely inside the science colony dome, but Mars couldn’t hold on to an atmosphere long enough for a planetwide attempt. The only suitable planets were in other solar systems, thousands of years away at best. Time had become the enemy of humankind. There had to be a faster way to reach the stars—a tesseract, a warp drive, a wormhole—some sort of shortcut to make the timescales manageable.

  She conducted small-scale experiments, but they always failed. She could not move even a single atom faster than light or outside of time. An array of monitors filled the wall behind Mei’s desk, displaying results from her current run on the particle accelerator, with dozens of tables and graphs that updated in real time. Dots traversed across the graphs leaving straight trails behind them, like a seismograph on a still day or a patient who had flatlined. She turned to go back to her telescope, but something moved in the corner of her eye. One of the graphs showed a small spike. Her current proje
ct was an attempt to send an electron out of known time, and—

  “Why are you tugging at the fabric of the universe, Prime?”

  “My name is Mei.” Her voice was calm, but her mind was racing. The entity she spoke with was not attached to any physical form, nor could she have said where the words came from.

  “You may call me Achron. This must be the first time we meet, for you.”

  Mei noted the emphasis on the last two words. “And not for you?”

  “Imagine yourself as a snake, with your past selves stretched out behind you, and your future selves extending forward. My existence is like that snake, but vaster. I am coiled around the universe, with past and present and future all integrated into a single consciousness. I am beyond time.”

  The conversation made sense in the way that dreams often do. Mei had so many questions she wanted to ask, academic queries on everything from philosophy to physics, but she started with the question that was closest to her heart. “Can you take me with you, outside of time? I am looking for a way to travel to distant worlds.”

  “Your physical being I could take, but your mind—you did/will explain it to me, that the stream of your consciousness is tied to the progression of time. Can you store your mind in a little black cube?”

  “No.”

  “It must be difficult to experience time. We are always together, but sometimes for you, we are not.”

  Mei waited for Achron to say more, but that was the end of the conversation. After a few hours staring at the night sky, she went to bed.

  Days passed, then months, then years. Mei continued her experiments with time, but nothing worked, and Achron did not return, no matter what she tried.

  A team of researchers in Colorado successfully stored a human consciousness inside a computer for 72 hours. The computer had been connected to a variety of external sensors, and the woman had communicated with the outside world via words on a monitor. The woman’s consciousness was then successfully returned to her body.

  News reports showed pictures of the computer. It was a black cube.

  Achron did not return. Mei began to doubt, despite the true prediction. She focused all her research efforts on trying to replicate the experiment that had summoned Achron to begin with, her experiment to send a single electron outside of time.

  “It is a good thing, for you, that Feynman is/was wrong. Think what might have happened if there was only one electron and you sent it outside of time.”

  “My experiments still aren’t working.” It was hard to get funding, and she was losing the respect of her colleagues. Years of failed research were destroying her career, but she couldn’t quit because she knew Achron existed. That alone was proof that there were wonders in the world beyond anything humankind had experienced so far.

  “They do and don’t work. It is difficult to explain to someone as entrenched in time as you. I am/have done something that will help you make the time bubbles. Then you did/will make stasis machines and travel between the stars.”

  “How will I know when it is ready?”

  “Was it not always ready and forever will be? Your reliance on time is difficult. I will make you a sign, a marker to indicate when the bubbles appear on your timeline. A little thing for only you to find.”

  “What if I don’t recognize it?” Mei asked, but the voice had gone. She tried to get on with her experiments, but she didn’t know whether the failures were due to her technique or because it simply wasn’t time yet. She slept through the hot summer days and stared out through her telescope at the night sky.

  Then one night she saw her sign. Carved into Mars at such a scale that she could see it through the tiny telescope in her living room, was the serpentine form of Achron, coiled around a human figure that bore her face.

  She took her research to a team of engineers. They could not help but recognize her face as the one carved into Mars. They built her a stasis pod.

  Then they built a hundred thousand more.

  The Lighthouse of Europa

  Mei stood at the base of the Lighthouse of Europa, in the heart of Gbadamosi. The city was named for the senior engineer who had developed the drilling equipment that created the huge cavern beneath Europa’s thick icy shell. Ajala, like so many of Mei’s friends, had uploaded to a consciousness cube and set off on an interstellar adventure.

  The time had come for Mei to choose.

  Not whether or not to go—she was old, but she had not lost her youthful dreams of new human worlds scattered across the galaxy. The hard choice was which ship, which method, which destination. The stasis pods that she had worked so hard to develop had become but one of many options as body fabrication technologies made rapid advancements.

  It had only been a couple hundred years, but many of the earliest ships to depart had already stopped transmitting back to the lighthouse. There was no way to know whether they had met some ill fate or forgotten or had simply lost interest. She wished there was a way to split her consciousness so that she could go on several ships at once, but a mind could only be coaxed to move from neurons to electronics, it could not be copied from a black cube.

  Mei narrowed the many options down to two choices. If she wanted to keep her body, she could travel on the Existential Tattoo to 59 Virginis. If she was willing to take whatever body the ship could construct for her when they arrived at their destination, she could take Kyo-Jitsu to Beta Hydri.

  Her body was almost entirely replacement parts, vat-grown organs, synthetic nerves, durable artificial skin. Yet there was something decidedly different about replacing a part here and there, as opposed to the entire body, all in a single go. She felt a strange ownership of this collection of foreign parts, perhaps because she could incorporate each one into her sense of self before acquiring the next. There was a continuity there, like the ships of ancient philosophy that were replaced board by board. But what was the point of transporting a body that wasn’t really hers, simply because she wore it now?

  She would take the Kyo-Jitsu, and leave her body behind. There was only one thing she wanted to do first. She would go to the top of the Lighthouse.

  The Lighthouse of Europa was the tallest structure ever built by humans, if you counted the roughly 2/3rds of the structure that was underneath the surface of Europa’s icy shell. The five kilometers of the Lighthouse that were beneath the ice were mostly a glorified elevator tube, opening out into the communications center in the cavernous city of Gbadamosi. Above the ice, the tower of the lighthouse extended a couple kilometers upward.

  There was an enclosed observation deck at the top of the tower, popular with Europan colonists up until the magnetic shielding failed, nearly a century ago. Workers, heavily suited to protect against the high levels of radiation, used the observation deck as a resting place during their long work shifts repairing the communications equipment. They gawked at Mei, and several tried to warn her of the radiation danger. Even in her largely artificial body, several hours in the tower would likely prove fatal.

  But Mei was abandoning her body, and she wanted one last glimpse of the solar system before she did it. The sun was smaller here, of course, but still surprisingly bright. She was probably damaging her eyes, staring at it, but what did it matter? This was her last day with eyes. Earth wouldn’t be visible for a few more hours, but through one of the observation deck’s many telescopes, she saw the thin crescent of Mars. She couldn’t make out the Colossus Achron had created for her—that was meant to be viewed from Earth, not Europa.

  “Is this the next time we meet?” Mei asked, her voice strange and hollow in the vast metal chamber of the observation deck.

  There was no answer.

  She tore herself away from the telescope and stood at the viewport. She wanted to remember this, no matter how she changed and how much time had passed. To see the Sun with human eyes and remember the planet of her childhood. When her mind went into the cube, she would be linked to shared sensors. She would get visual and auditory input, and
she would even have senses that were not part of her current experience. But it would not be the same as feeling the cold glass of the viewport beneath her fingertips and looking out at the vast expanse of space.

  The technician who would move Mei’s mind into the cube was young. Painfully young, to Mei’s old eyes. “Did you just arrive from Earth?”

  “I was born here,” the tech answered.

  Mei smiled sadly. There must be hundreds of humans now, perhaps thousands, who had never known Earth. Someday the ones who didn’t know would outnumber those who did. She wondered if she would still exist to see it.

  She waited patiently as the tech prepared her for the transfer. She closed her eyes for the last time . . .

  . . . and was flooded with input from her sensors. It took her .8 seconds to reorient, but her mind raced so fast that a second stretched on like several days. This was a normal part of the transition. Neural impulses were inherently slower than electricity. She integrated the new senses, working systematically to make sense of her surroundings. There were sensors throughout the city, and she had access to all of them.

  In a transfer clinic near the base of the Lighthouse, a young technician stood beside Mei’s body, barely even beginning to run the diagnostics to confirm that the transition had been successful. The body on the table was Mei, but her new identity was something more than that, and something less. She took a new designation, to mark the change. She would call her disembodied self Prime. Perhaps that would help Achron find her, sometime in the enormous vastness of the future.