Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t defend yourself,” Axford jumped in quickly. “I’m all for you expending energy and resources on ways to fight back. I’m just saying you shouldn’t fight back unless you have to, that’s all. You could end up doing us more harm than good. Try to remember, it’s the Starfish who are our real enemies.”

  Hatzis snorted derisively. “But as you said, we don’t have much hope of defeating them, do we? Technologically speaking, they are so far ahead of us that they’re effectively invincible.”

  “Which is exactly why talking to the Yuhl makes more sense than fighting with them.”

  “If the Yuhl knew how to defeat the Starfish, don’t you think they would have done it by now?”

  “Maybe they lack the will,” he said, shrugging. “Or they’re still building up their strength. Combined, we might be enough to do the job.”

  She stared at him, trying to see past the android facade to get a glimpse into what he was really thinking. “You don’t honestly believe that, do you?”

  “I believe we need to try something more than picking fights with the smallest kid in the schoolyard just to make us feel better about ourselves.”

  “And when you’re a bug about to be stepped on, you don’t hang around to philosophize and make poor schoolyard analogies! In the end, as always, it comes down to practicalities. I’d give up ever knowing what the Spinners and Starfish are in exchange for simply staying alive. And I don’t believe you’d willingly sacrifice yourself just to make a point, either.”

  “Not all of me, perhaps,” he said.

  SOL, I’M SORRY TO BOTHER YOU AGAIN, BUT WE HAVE ANOTHER REQUEST TO DOCK.

  She turned away from her argument with Axford with a sigh of frustration.

  WHO THIS TIME?

  IT’S PETER ALANDER.

  WHAT?

  She didn’t believe it at first. On the one hand, the timing was remarkably fortuitous, for it would allow her to see if his story matched Axford’s. But on the other, the timing was unsettlingly suspicious.

  TELL HIM TO PARK SILENT LIQUIDITY IN THE MAIN DOCK AND COME DOWN STRAIGHTAWAY.

  I WILL, BUT THAT’S NOT THE NAME OF HIS HOLE SHIP.

  ACCORDING TO AXFORD —

  THIS ISN’T PETER ALANDER FROM ADRASTEIA, SOL. THIS ONE’S FROM VAHAGN IN CHI HERCULES.

  VAHAGN? I’VE NEVER HEARD OF THAT COLONY.

  NEITHER HAD WE UNTIL HE ARRIVED. IT’S NEW. CHI HERCULES IS RIGHT ON THE SPINNER FRONT; THE COLONY WAS CONTACTED ONLY TWO DAYS AGO. HE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT THE LAST BROADCAST WE SENT.

  Hatzis closed her eyes and sighed. Clearly it was going to be one of those days.

  * * *

  “Welcome to Sothis, Peter,” she said as, half an hour later, the chi Hercules version of Alander entered Arachne’s cockpit. She had been expecting to see Alander’s face but instead saw an android wearing general-purpose features, the sort of average face that looked like no one in particular, employed when an android was used by many people either at once or in series. He obviously hadn’t had his own body grown before leaving Vahagn. She made sure her surprise was kept in check as she extended a hand toward him. “It’s always a pleasure to meet a representative from a new colony.”

  “Spare me the bullshit, Caryl,” he said, his hands at his sides, refusing to take hers in greeting. “I haven’t come all this way for a pleasant chat.” His gaze shifted to Axford. “And I certainly wasn’t expecting to see Frank the Ax here, either. I wouldn’t have thought you the type to indulge in hand-holding and banner waving.”

  “I assure you, I’m not,” Axford responded with a slight inclination of his head.

  “Then—” Alander hesitated for a split second, his eyes becoming vacant. Then he was back, clearly annoyed with himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Something’s not going quite right with me. Cleo, our SMC, says they had problems with my engram during the voyage out, and they had to put me on ice. But I don’t remember any of that. All I know is that the Spinners woke me up when the gifts came. They brought me back from the dead.”

  Not quite, Hatzis thought, taking a microsecond out of the conversation to dip into his Overseer. There she found the same elegant yet roughshod technique that the Gifts had used in senescent colonies to give a nonviable engram a kind of life. His mind was fundamentally unstable, careering from thought to thought with all the control of a drunk driver on one of Earth’s old freeways; his thoughts reached a gridlock every few minutes, unable to sustain the illusion that all the conflicting processes that comprised them belonged to one mind. Every time he failed, however, instead of crashing to a halt, his initial state was reloaded from the Overseer, deleting any minor changes that might have built up in that time. This initial state would only run for another few minutes before needing to be rebooted but, combined with the memories it had laid down in those few minutes, it was at least enough to create the illusion of continuity. That’s all it was, though: an illusion. Alander’s mind was like a short loop of film going around and around, redrawing over the frames as it went to make it appear as though the action was changing.

  Hatzis knew that this couldn’t be maintained forever. It didn’t address the problem, only the symptoms.

  She withdrew, satisfied he hadn’t noticed her intrusion. She didn’t like having to rely on this crude method to revive nonviable engrams. But as she hadn’t yet been able to find a more effective technique, it was just going to have to do for now. She didn’t want to spend the rest of eternity with a bunch of tape loops, endlessly repeating the same emotions, over and over again.

  “You’re not the only engram who’s had that problem,” she said as diplomatically as she could.

  “Well, I’ve had a couple of days to sort myself out,” he said, “and I’m sure I’ll feel better in a couple more.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Axford.

  Alander shot him an impatient look but said nothing in response. His lack of curiosity was puzzling. Instead, he turned back to Hatzis and said, “We picked up your message on the ftl communicator. Everyone in the Marcy is stunned by what’s been going on. They’ve been there for over forty years, now, and there’s never been any hint of life. Then suddenly, this. It’s pulled everything out from under them: the Earth is gone, humanity is practically dead, and it looks as though you’re the only real one of us left.” He shook his head slowly. “I can’t believe it either. Two days ago I woke up thinking we’d just broken orbit, and here I am, a century in the future, and aliens are fighting over the scraps of what we’ve become.”

  “Trust me when I say I can appreciate your bewilderment,” Hatzis said. “Having an extra century on you doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “It obviously hasn’t made you any wiser, either,” said Alander pointedly. “Frankly, I can’t believe what I’m hearing in your broadcasts. We finally find evidence of intelligent alien life—sentient beings we can actually talk to—and you’re declaring war on them? Jesus Christ, Caryl. Are you insane?”

  She felt herself stiffen and was unable to repress it. “If you came all this way to abuse me, then you can damn well—”

  “What do you expect, Caryl? You think I’m going to sit back and say nothing?”

  She took a brief moment to control her rising anger. “I gather you came with Cleo’s approval.” Cleo Samson, according to Sol’s records, was the civilian survey manager of the Geoffrey Marcy, core vessel dispatched to explore chi Hercules.

  Alander looked uncomfortable. “Actually, they voted against it. But I came anyway; the Gifts listen to me, not the others, and I recognize a con-con-con-conspiracy of silence when I see one.”

  He nodded as though perfectly satisfied with the point he’d made. Hatzis didn’t say anything, and neither did Axford. She wondered if Alander even suspected the resetting of his Overseer functions and the slight glitch it had caused.

  Axford’s android couldn’t hide a slight smirk, though. “Tell me, Peter, how it feels to be proven wrong.”
<
br />   Alander frowned. “About what?”

  “About us being the only intelligent life in the universe, of course. That was your theory, wasn’t it? Back on Earth? I can’t imagine it being invalidated in a less subtle way.”

  “Who says it’s been in-invalidated?”

  “The facts speak for themselves, surely?”

  “It depends on how you define intelligence.” Alander bristled. “Or, more importantly, what sort of observer is required to collapse the state vector.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Axford, looking at Hatzis as though for explanation.

  “It’s simple,” said Alander, speaking quickly, almost desperately. “My theory states that the early universe functioned as a quantum computer, existing as a combination of near-infinite but slightly different versions of itself, all overlapped. Under such conditions, the chances of molecules and atoms combining in just the right way to kick-start self-replication are greatly increased. That’s the first hurdle. The second hurdle is evolving this basic form of life up to something conscious, and it’s as big a hurdle as the first. The trouble is, once this new form of life becomes conscious, it collapses the universe back to one version of itself, so it no longer has the advantages of using quantum processing to create life elsewhere. It’s like setting your computer to finding prime numbers, then telling it to reduce its capacity by a million once it has found just one. The existence of one intelligent life form in the universe, therefore, reduces the odds of finding another one to almost zero.”

  Axford opened his mouth to say something, but Alander talked right over him. “I assume you’re raising the Starfish as evidence of intelligent life existing concurrently with humanity, thereby either disproving the theory or requiring an extremely unlikely coincidence to explain it away. But neither is the case. You see, according to your daily broadcast, the Starfish and the Spinners both exhibit behavioral traits indicative of machine intelligence. They perform limited functions, such as depositing the Gifts—themselves machine intelligences—and destroying colonies, while at the same time refusing to acknowledge any form of external communication. They could easily be robotic benefactors and planet smashers locked in blind, automatic ritual by their makers, millennia ago. Would such minds have true consciousness? Would they be enough on their own to cancel out the quantum-computing function of the universe? I don’t think we can assume that.”

  “What about the Yuhl, Peter?” Hatzis managed to get in. “How do you explain them?”

  “What about them? Has anyone apart from yourself even seen them?”

  “Yes,” put in Axford. “I have, actually.”

  “You or another version of you?” said Alander.

  “What are you suggesting? That these aliens were made up?”

  “Why not? The illusion of a common enemy would be just what you’d need to draw people together under you.”

  “Make up your mind, Peter,” Hatzis said. “First you come here to berate me for declaring war on them, and now you don’t believe they exist at all. Which is it to be?”

  “I—I...” He fell silent as his eyes became vacant once more, his expression touched by the inner turmoil vexing him. Then, just as suddenly, confusion vanished and was replaced by anger. “My point is the same either way,” he announced.

  “Which is what, Peter?”

  “That you’re completely mishandling this situation. It’s time someone else took over. Someone more levelheaded.”

  “Like who?”

  “Let the people decide,” he said. “The way it’s supposed to be.”

  Coming from him, the accusation of incompetence was like a slap in the face, and for a long while all she could do was stare at him in silence. But, she reminded herself, it wasn’t really coming from him. It was coming from the old him, the one she remembered from entrainment camp back on Earth. Arrogant, self-confident, and bitingly intelligent, he had been automatically dismissive of anyone he regarded as inferior. The only person close to him had been Lucia; somehow she had seen past the façade and found the person underneath, the one who had emerged after months of struggling to keep his mind together, the fragile, more tolerant Peter Alander who had returned from Adrasteia to report the coming of the Spinners.

  That was the Alander Sol had come to know, which this Alander patently wasn’t. From his point of view, entrainment camp had only been days ago. He was still on a high from the launch, buoyed by the knowledge that more copies of him had been sent to the stars than of any other human. He hadn’t yet had to confront the knowledge that none of those copies had worked beyond a few days, and that for all his cutting intellect, he would be regarded as the failure of the engram program.

  She waited as his Overseer cycled through once again. He blinked, then shook his head.

  “Well?” he snapped. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

  She shrugged. “What am I supposed to say, Peter? ‘Thanks for pointing out my failings; how about you take over?’ “

  He turned away from her sarcasm to Axford. “And what about you? Are you going to let her run the show?

  “I have my own show to run, Peter.” Frank the Ax gestured with apparent nonchalance. “Survival is the game, and I’ll accept any means to that end.”

  “Even if she gets us killed in a war we don’t need to fight?”

  “You don’t have to fight it, Peter,” she said. “Opt out, or don’t sign up. Other colonies have seceded. No one’s forcing you onto the front line.”

  “Don’t treat me like an idiot, Caryl!” He turned on her, and for the first time the undercurrent of hysteria running beneath his surface behavior showed clearly through. His eyes showed too much white and his hands shook. Alander knew he wasn’t in control, but he refused to give in to his weakness. He would maintain the pretense until he fell apart completely.

  “We are the front line,” he went on heatedly. “Vahagn will be dragged in whether it wants to be or not. If you don’t get us, the Yuhl will. And if the Yuhl don’t, then the Starfish will. How do you think we feel facing such possibilities? You can’t blame us for wanting an alternative.”

  But there is no us, she wanted to say. You stole your crew’s hole ship and came here to vent your tensions to the one person who’s trying to do something constructive.

  “No one’s treating you like an idiot, Peter,” she said calmly, not wanting to aggravate his growing hysteria any further.

  He stared at her with tight lips, as though biting back the urge to contradict her.

  GOU MANG.

  YES, SOL?

  I WANT YOU TO SEND SOMEONE TO HIS HOLE SHIP—WHAT WAS IT CALLED?

  BETTY.

  GET INSIDE AND PUT IT IN ORBIT. HE OBVIOUSLY DOESN’T REALIZE THAT THE HOLE SHIPS WILL TALK TO ANYONE, UNLIKE THE GIFTS.

  Gou Mang hesitated.

  ARE YOU SURE THIS IS A GOOD IDEA, SOL?

  POSITIVE. IT’S ABOUT TIME SOMEONE TAUGHT THIS ARROGANT PRICK A LESSON IN HUMILITY.

  2.1.4

  In cosmological terms, Beid and Sirius were close neighbors, with only ten light-years separating the two. The trip between them took just five subjective hours—half that in the real universe. Nevertheless, for Alander it felt like forever.

  In the pre-Spinner relativistic universe, Einstein’s laws had promised interstellar travel in the blink of an eye, no matter how many decades they actually took. Becoming an engram with UNESSPRO had offered another way to solve that problem. An impatient traveler could slow down their thought processes or even halt them completely, so that a century could pass in a few seconds for them. Alander knew of very few people, personally or secondhand, who had decided to sit out the journey in real time. He supposed if they had, they would never have arrived intact. According to Hatzis, engram senescence became a problem between fifty and seventy years, and most of the survey missions were that long. In his darker moments, he imagined what a disaster it would have been had the option to abbreviate the journey not been open to the engrams. What would th
e Spinners have made of a fleet of probes orbiting a thousand different stars around Sol, all completely dead?

  After his own experiences with engram breakdown, he was reluctant to tinker with his time sense unless he had to. Without knowing exactly what the Praxis had done to him—or what Hatzis herself had done, for that matter—he wasn’t taking any chances with his sanity. Just because he felt perfectly fine didn’t mean that something wouldn’t suddenly trip him up and take him all the way back to where he had been on Adrasteia, picking up the pieces of his personality and trying to put them back together in a way that made sense. Any sort of sense.

  So he sat out the trip in real time, thinking over his experiences with the Yuhl and the Praxis, and wondering what he was going to do when he arrived at Sothis. Of course, that depended on what state of mind Hatzis was in and how far her network had advanced. Or degraded, he supposed. If the Starfish sneak attacks had taken as deep a bite into the colonies as he sometimes feared, panic and self-preservation could tear apart what little remained of the old UNESSPRO team spirit.

  Sometimes, when the silence grew too loud, he talked to Ueh. His fellow envoy/catechist was back behind Silent Liquidity’s invisible barrier, comfortable in his own atmosphere and gravity. From what Alander could make out, the alien didn’t seem to mind the journey or the isolation. If anything, he took the isolation much as Alander did, only venturing out of it when his thoughts became too much.

  “Peter/Alander and Francis/Axford,” Ueh said at one point. “What is the relation?”

  “Relation?”

  “Between Peter/Alander and Francis/Axford.”

  Alander thought his answer through carefully, presuming that Ueh didn’t mean relation in the physical sense. The Yuhl had a strong sense of hierarchy—as did humanity, with its various ranks, titles, and power plays—but Alander hadn’t quite managed to grasp the subtleties of it yet.