by Peter Watts
AIs aimed city-sized mirrors, and they aimed their curiosity. An otherwise ordinary lump of iron and frost was found spinning around its long axis. No broadcasts rose from the asteroid’s surface or from its interior. There were no heat signatures, no warnings of slumbering, helpless life. The asteroid had an old face, eroded to rubble save for the largest crater—a deep hole riding that narrow equator. The echo came from a slender gray shape tucked at the crater’s bottom. The oddity was gray and otherwise too faint to resolve, and the crater soon turned out of view. But more telescopes were brought to bear, watching the little world spinning, and eventually the crater and its slight mystery swept back into view.
Diagnostic lasers pounded their target with blunt, calibrated fury.
Woven diamond and its various alloys would have boiled along the edges, creating a angry mist of carbon. Polished metals and metametals should have surrendered a stew of elements, each throwing up signals and clean interpretations. But the returning data were simple, simple, simple. Most of the heat was absorbed without effect. The only signatures came from the iron and nickel dust that had presumably gathered on the object’s surface. Hyperfiber was the best answer. What the object was was hyperfiber, which was always high-tech artificial, and until more thorough tests were run, that was the only conclusion worth holding.
An army of AIs helped design the next phase.
Standing on that crater lip, a human witness would have seen stars overhead, but no Great Ship. The Ship was still too distant for small eyes. Then brilliance would arrive, coherent light scorching the crater’s bowl until the iron was red-hot and soft. A second pulse, aimed like a scalpel, vaporized the metal substrates, resulting in an asymmetric blast, and the mysterious object was thrown high, beginning a good hard spin as the lasers quit.
A mysterious, slightly warm object rotated around its own long axis.
Then the asteroid’s faint gravity reclaimed it, letting it settle on the sloppy iron.
Mirrors watched everything while talking to one another, piecing together a definitive image of something still thousands of seconds in the future.
An old protocol was triggered.
More lasers were brought on line, aimed and calibrated but holding their fire, waiting for the prize to vanish.
And with that, the doomed little world began its final day.
The crew was between jobs, physically and mentally. Hundreds of Remoras working with machines and reactors had just finished pouring a large patch on the hull. But while others shepherded the curing, his crew was committed to something smaller and much quicker, and in the end, far more important than a big patch job. Orleans was taking a group of youngsters to an undisclosed location. The old Remora intended to give them a tour of one of the Ship’s oldest patches, letting them learn from the successes and glaring failures of people who died long ago.
The Remoras rode inside a big, nearly empty skimmer. Each of them was genetically human. Each one was also a lifesuit of hyperfiber with a single diamond plate over what passed for a face. Each suit held a tiny reactor feeding the machinery as well as an array of recycling systems that fed what wasn’t quite human anymore. Fourteen youngsters were onboard. But of course calling anyone a “youngster” was a tease. The baby in the group was three hundred standard years old, while the oldest student was over a thousand. But being a Remora—a honorable, trustworthy Remora—involved skills that were mastered slowly, like the layers patiently building an enduring reef. And living like any Remora, exposed to the universe, was a hazardous, often too-brief species of life.
Three thousand years. That was a milestone largely regarded as worthy of celebration.
Ten thousand years. If a Remora could care for the Great Ship that long . . . well, that was one way to define a good, noble existence.
When death came, it did so suddenly, usually without generous warnings. Some dense chunk of asteroid slipped past the lasers and bombs. An old power plant went sideways, and the skimmer blew. Or maybe the Remora became careless, and his or her lifesuit body failed in some spectacular fashion.
Despite endless hazards, a respectable few Remoras reached twenty thousand years.
A portion of those old-timers were destined for forty thousand birthdays.
But Orleans was one of the exceptional few. Like every other Remora, he was born on the Great Ship. But that was eighty thousand years ago. Orleans was one of the final survivors of those very early generations.
As such, he had to be be famous.
And he had to be notorious.
Perhaps no other creature in existence, Remora or otherwise, had Orleans’ spectacular capacity to measure threat and opportunity, while his reservoirs of luck seemed to defy all calculation.
There were times when the people worshipped Orleans for his good fortune as well as his wealth of practical knowledge, and they would repeat every good story about the long odds that their friend had defeated or tricked or at least endured.
But this was not one of those times.
Youngsters in this generation had suffered horrible losses. More comets than usual had slipped past defense systems, impacting on brave smart and very unlucky Remoras. Worse still, early this year an alien reactor detonated unexpectedly, and the blast was in the hundred megaton range. Thousands of their peers had been vaporized. That’s why these fourteen youngsters felt abused by the Creation. They were entitled. And that is why they had embraced some very narrow, exceptionally rigid beliefs, including one simple, well-polished belief was that the oldest Remora was a coward in his heart. How else could Orleans have survived for so long? And with that faith in hand, they were free to look at him as if he were nothing but a contemptible piece of worn-out man.
The youngsters liked to glare at Orleans, snarling on private channels.
As if he couldn’t read their baby faces.
And Orleans rather enjoyed these harsh thoughts. It made him a better teacher by making more determined students, each one of these half-born children hungry to prove the old man’s flaws in front of her peers.
“I know where you’re taking us,” one child began.
Gleem was her name.
Orleans looked at the ugly, almost-human face. “You know where, do you?”
“Yes. And I’m warning you. I know the trick.”
Gleem had a bright gray human face and two white eyes, a crooked nose that couldn’t decide where to grow, and a shiny black-lipped mouth full of black teeth. Being three hundred years and few months old, she was the babies’ baby. According to a calendar full of arbitrary timemarks, she was also the last of her generation, and as sometimes happened with the lastborn, she was something of a prodigy—an expert with machines of every species and every useful job.
The girl had a two-and-a-half meter tall lifesuit for a shell.
For a skin.
Every Remora lived inside a lifesuit. Each lifesuit was built at the instant of conception, and that suit was theirs until a final moment of existence, usually on the leading edge of plasmatic fire.
“I know exactly what you’re planning,” she said.
Orleans laughed at his student.
The black-lipped mouth sneered.
And he laughed louder, on the public channel. Very little that was human showed in Orleans current face. He had six eyes evenly spread around the edges, and down low was a complicated nose full of delicately folded skin, looking like a flower blossom decorating the region where a chin might be set. The skull inside the helmet had been reassembled in novel ways, while his current mouth was in the middle of his inspired face—a large and wet and very good mouth designed for laughing.
Every mouth Orleans grew could enjoy a good joke.
“So you know,” he said. “And I thought I had such a fine surprise waiting.”
“It’s the Rudger fissure, that’s where the patch is. And you built that patch when you were our age.”
“A full crew built it, and I happened to be there, yeah, except others were in ch
arge of the operation. But you’re right, I did some of the work.”
“You made mistakes,” she said.
“We all did that,” he agreed.
“But we won’t fix the mistakes, because you never let us.”
“I don’t let anyone do anything. Haven’t you heard?”
The other youngsters were listening. But like people anywhere, they felt obliged to look elsewhere, pretending indifference.
“You’ll take us to some corner of that patch, and we’ll have to mark each little blunder,” she said.
Orleans let everybody consider his silence. Then with a sturdy, careful voice, he said, “Your name. Gleem.”
“What about it?”
“I’ve been meaning to ask. I knew another woman named Gleem. Did you steal the sound from her?”
The black mouth wasn’t bad at laughing, but scoffing was its specialty. “That’s a simple question to answer. Look at the records.”
“Except I wanted to ask you,” he said. “Which is not so simple, apparently.”
Others laughed at that.
Gleem tightened her sneer. And then very quietly, she said, “It was my mother’s mother’s mother’s name.”
Orleans knew that, or he didn’t. What mattered was to hear her explain a little bit about her simple, unfinished self.
“It’s just a name,” she said.
Orleans broke into a hard, long laugh.
“What do you mean?” the youngster demanded. “What’s so funny, old man?”
One of her peers called out a warning. “He’s got a lesson for us.”
Which Orleans intended to impart on everyone, probably right away. But before his good-at-laughing mouth could offer another word, an encrypted transmission arrived. It came from a location that in eighty thousand years had never once spoken to Orleans, even by accident. He listened to the transmission. He listened, and the others watched him saying nothing, every young eye narrowed with thought. And then feeling bored, they began to chat among themselves while he continued to absorb orders and suggestions from high machine-minds that were too smart to be wrong and far too smart to appreciate what it was that they had discovered.
That one eye used to be alive, fully and utterly alive, and the body and mind attached to the eye were healthy, possessed by the certainty that nothing would ever go seriously wrong. Yet in the middle of a routine moment, everything went wrong. Other eyes and minds were close by. Everybody was riding a fine ship, rockets opened to full throttle, pushing colonists to some world far too distant to be seen. Then there was no one else. The others were missing. What happened to them? And where did the ship go? And why was this single creature tumbling through the blackness, screaming hard with a mouth barely born?
He was scared, far too scared to think along proper lines. And he spun wildly, and then he managed to quit weeping but couldn’t stop tumbling, stars sweeping past his lidless gaze.
What had gone so horribly wrong?
Life on the starship had always been busy and pleasant, free of discord and blessed with moments of small joy. Then a critical machine on the bow demanded attention. It was decided that one of the crew had to dress in a lifesuit and step into the cold black. There was a song from the bridge, a rousing plea for one brave volunteer, and nobody answered. Then the leaders examined the rosters, identifying the most deserving, least important crewmen. That was when he sang back at them. That’s when he volunteered, and it was the last time in his life that he would hear others singing about their own happiness and considerable relief.
Inside the airlock, ten lifesuits stood at attention. Because he was small, he claimed the largest, thickest suit for himself. Feeling big was the only reason. Then he passed through the airlock and into space. The work itself was quite routine. Nothing went wrong and nothing felt wrong. One navigation system needed close attention, and there was a menu to follow, and he did the job perfectly if a little slowly. His suit and his body were tethered to the outside of the starship, nearly finished with the job, and then the ship was gone. Some huge soundless event tore him loose, gave him new momentum, and that terrific jolt turned his body into living water and scared grit.
Modern life could endure almost any abuse, short of plasmatic fire. His bioceramic mind fell into a state deeper than sleep but far, far removed from Death. Then his water and organelles and phages found one another, and they found energy and heat, reconstituting a body that allowed him to become aware again, spinning and screaming, weeping and then not weeping.
How much time had passed?
He asked the suit.
The big lifesuit had counted five days.
But what happened to the ship and colonists and the rest of the crew?
It was a critical matter, but the suit had no opinion. And no interest. It was a minimally conscious machine, somewhat damaged by the abrupt fury. Maybe the ship’s engines exploded. Or a black comet gutted its body. Speculation was pointless. Circumstances were critical. But the suit was still able to hear a close strong radio signal, and there were no signals. The vacuum was silent. Nobody was calling to the suit or to its ungrateful passenger.
The passenger wailed until exhausted.
Detecting hunger, the suit fed him and infused his fluids with fresh oxygen.
The simplest lifesuit could purify water and air, and it could synthesize food, and when necessary, generate pleasant sounds and odors. This particular lifesuit also possessed two fully-fueled reactors and several banks of unfinished machinery. Unfinished machines could be organized in any direction necessary. The suit had been designed to serve this starship and another fifty ships in the future. And to the limits of its cognitive powers, this suit could help its passenger survive.
The starship was no more. There would be no rescue or even a sorrowful greeting from the black of space. An undeserving life had been delivered to this one creature, and it came for no good reason, and now his suffering would stretch into an eternity.
That passenger proved to be an obsessive, half-mad beast. Each conscious moment was suffused with thoughts about those last moments of normal life. In excruciating detail, he replayed routine events where nothing went wrong, where he did what was expected of him, and every memory left him aching with guilt. Perhaps the engines failed. But if he hadn’t been brave enough or pliable enough to march out onto the hull, he would have remained inside, and maybe he would have seen the malfunction and saved the ship. Or an impact killed everyone. But if he had volunteered with the first call, and if he had worn a smaller, less massive suit, the vagaries of those tiny motions and masses would have shifted the ship’s trajectory a cell’s width. In another ten million kilometers, that faint change would have shifted the ship hundreds of meters, and everybody would have been saved, and he would have been the unknown hero.
Enticing stories want to be told. But of all the possibilities, what was most likely, and what was most wonderful, was any variation killed him along with everybody else, leaving him beyond doubt and every misery.
“Kill me,” he told the suit.
Not understanding, the suit continued its important work.
So the passenger tried to murder himself. But the lifesuit was designed to care for almost any level of damage. There were multiple ways to force its passenger to breathe and find nutrition as well as adequate energy to repair what pathetic little damages that the creature could inflict on a body that couldn’t be touched.
Ages passed.
Immortal beings can bear horrible things, and misery found its natural, bearable state. But with the ages and small measures of cleverness, the suit did manage one small decency: Wasted heat had to be bled off the reactors, and the suit did so in an uneven fashion, the wild spinning body slowing and then stopping entirely.
Eventually the passenger went through space with his one eye forward.
Still screaming, still weeping, but never quite as much as before.
Orleans offered telemetry and images, and then he let the fourtee
n children weave their own conclusions.
“The object, the artifact, is eight meters long, two wide,” he told them, opening the full files for examination. “Hyperfiber on the outside, and that’s all we know. This is the AIs’ best guess of its shape, its density, and this is its velocity right now, and this is how much the prize needs to slow to survive its impact with the Ship. Which is coming in just a little while. There’s no way around that ending.”
Orleans realized that his voice was too excited, and so he paused. He didn’t want hopes escaping too soon.
“That’s a biological shape,” said one boy, and another, and the oldest girl. But Gleem was first to point out, “It’s a high-grav configuration, but I’m not seeing this beast in any of our libraries . . . ”
“How old is it?” someone asked.
Orleans had no idea.
But for fun, he said, “One billion years, and a day.”
Nobody believed that. But all of the children, or even Orleans, could not stop playing with enormous numbers.
“So how do we manage this landing?” another boy asked. “Because they want to save the artifact, right?”
“I’m an idiot,” their teacher said. “You tell me how.”
A debate was launched. Fifty opinions came from every mouth. Except for Gleem. She walked to the front of the skimmer, silently making calculations, answering an entirely different problem.
And Orleans remained behind everyone, watching.
Thirteen students devised one utterly workable scheme. The artifact was built from hyperfiber, but descending at one-third the speed of light, even the finest grade of fiber would shatter. The Great Ship refused to slow, so the target needed to find quite a lot of velocity and find it quickly. Thankfully the asteroid was a tough, useful blessing. One hundred billion tons of iron could be melted, and that melt could be vaporized in controlled bursts, banks of lasers working with surgical grace and surgical conviction, delivering just enough thrust with just enough stability to launch the artifact away from the Great Ship. And then with luck, the inevitable collision might not spoil the object’s value for engineers and historians.