Spin

by Wilson, Robert Charles Charles

  “Or murkuds,” I said.

  He grinned. “Or murkuds.”

  “In other words, they might evolve.”

  “They will evolve, and unpredictably. But we’ve placed some limits on that. Or we believe we have. As I said, controversy abounds.”

  Whenever Wun talked about Martian politics, I envisioned wrinkly men and women in pastel togas debating abstractions from stainless steel podiums. In fact, Wun insisted, Martian parliamentarians behaved more like cash-strapped farmers bickering at a grain auction; and the clothing—well, I didn’t even try to picture the clothing; on formal occasions Martians of both sexes tended to dress like the queen of hearts in a Bicycle deck.

  But while the debates had been long and heartfelt, the plan itself was relatively simple. The replicators would be delivered scattershot into the far, cold extremities of the solar system. Some infinitesimally small fraction of those replicators would alight on two or three of the cometary nuclei that constitute the Oort Cloud. There they would begin to reproduce.

  Their genetic information, Wun said, was encoded into molecules that were thermally unstable anywhere warmer than the moons of Neptune. But in the hypercold environment for which they had been designed, submicroscopic filaments in the replicators would begin a slow, painstaking metabolism. They grew at speeds that would make a bristlecone pine look rushed, but grow they would, assimilating trace volatiles and organic molecules and shaping ice into cellular walls, ribs, spars, and joiners.

  By the time the replicators had consumed a few hundred cubic feet of cometary nucleus, give or take, their interconnections would begin to complexify and their behavior would become more purposeful. They would grow highly sophisticated appendages, eyes of ice and carbon to sweep the starry darkness.

  In a decade or so the replicator colony would have made of itself a sophisticated communal entity capable of recording and broadcasting rudimentary data about its environment. It would look at the sky and ask: Is there a planet-sized dark body circling the nearest star?

  Posing and answering the question would consume more decades of time, and at least initially the answer was a foregone conclusion: yes, two worlds circling this star were dark bodies, Earth and Mars.

  Nevertheless—patiently, doggedly, slowly—the replicators would collate this data and broadcast it back to their point of origin: to us, or at least to our listening satellites.

  Then, in its senescence as a complex machine, the replicator colony would break down into individual clusters of simple cells, identify another bright or nearby star, and use accumulated volatiles mined from the host cometary nucleus to propel its seeds out of the solar system. (They would leave behind a tiny fragment of themselves to act as a radio repeater, a passive node in a growing network.)

  These second-generation seeds would drift in interstellar space for years, decades, millennia. Most would eventually perish, lost on fruitless trajectories or drawn into gravitational eddies. Some, unable to escape the faint but distant pull of the sun, would fall back into the solar Oort Cloud and repeat the process, stupidly but patiently eating ice and recording redundant information. If two strains encountered each other they would exchange cellular material, average out copying errors induced by time or radiation, and produce offspring nearly but not exactly like themselves.

  Some few would reach the icy halo of a nearby star and begin the cycle anew, this time gathering fresh information, which they would eventually send home in bursts of data, brief digital orgasms. Binary star, they might say, no dark planetary bodies; or they might say, White dwarf star, one dark planetary body.

  And the cycle would repeat again.

  And again.

  And again, one star to the next, stepwise, centuries by millennia, agonizingly slowly, but speedily enough as the galaxy measures time—as we clocked the external universe from our entombment. Our days would encompass their years by the hundreds of thousands and a decade of our slow time would see them infest most of the galaxy.

  Information passed at light-speed node-to-node would be forwarded, would modify behavior, would direct new replicators toward unexplored territory, would suppress redundant information so that core nodes were not overwhelmed. In effect we would be wiring the galaxy for a kind of rudimentary thought. The replicators would build a neural network as big as the night sky, and it would talk to us.

  Were there risks? Of course there were risks.

  Absent the Spin, Wun said, the Martians would never have approved such an arrogant appropriation of the galaxy’s resources. This wasn’t just an act of exploration; it was an intervention, an imperial reordering of the galactic ecology. If there were other sentient species out there—and the existence of the Hypotheticals had pretty much answered that question in the affirmative—the dispersal of the replicators might be misunderstood as aggression. Which might invite retaliation.

  The Martians had only reconsidered this risk when they detected Spin structures under construction above their own northern and southern poles.

  “The Spin renders objections moot,” Wun said, “or nearly so. With luck the replicators will tell us something important about the Hypotheticals, or atleast the extent of their work in the galaxy. We might be able to discern the purpose of the Spin. Failing that, the replicators will serve as a sort of warning beacon to other intelligent species facing the same problem. Close analysis would suggest to a thoughtful observer the purpose for which the network was constructed. Other civilizations might choose to tap into it. The knowledge could help them protect themselves. To succeed where we failed.”

  “You think we’ll fail?”

  Wun shrugged. “Haven’t we failed already? The sun is very old now. You know that, Tyler. Nothing lasts indefinitely. And under the circumstances, for us, even ‘indefinitely’ isn’t a very long time.”

  Maybe it was the way he said it, smiling his sad little Martian sincerity-smile and leaning forward in his wicker chair, but the weight of the pronouncement was quietly shocking.

  Not that it surprised me. We all knew we were doomed. Doomed, at the very least, to live out our lives under a shell that was the only thing protecting us from a hostile solar system. The sunlight that had made Mars habitable would cook the Earth if the Spin membrane was stripped away. And even Mars (in its own dark envelope) was rapidly slipping out of the so-called habitable zone. The mortal star that was the mother of all life had passed into bloody senescence and would kill us without conscience.

  Life had been born on the fringe of an unstable nuclear reaction. That was true and it had always been true; it had been true before the Spin, even when the sky was clear and summer nights twinkled with distant, irrelevant stars. It had been true but it hadn’t mattered because human life was short; countless generations would live and die in the span of a solar heartbeat. But now, God help us, we were outliving the sun. Either we would end up as cinders circling its corpse or we would be preserved into eternal night, encapsulated novelties with no real home in the universe.

  “Tyler? Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I said. Thinking, for some reason, of Diane. “Maybe the best we can hope for is a little understanding before the curtain comes down.”

  “Curtain?”

  “Before the end.”

  “It’s not much consolation,” Wun admitted. “But yes, it may be the best we can hope for.”

  “Your people have known about the Spin for millennia. And in all that time you haven’t been able to learn anything about the Hypotheticals?”

  “No. I’m sorry. I don’t have that to offer. About the physical nature of the Spin we have only a few speculations.” (Which Jason had recently attempted to explain to me: something about temporal quanta, mostly mathematics and far beyond the reach of practical engineering, Martian or terrestial.) “About the Hypotheticals themselves, nothing at all. As for what they want from us—” He shrugged. “Only more speculation. The question we asked ourselves was, what was special about the Earth when it was encapsu
lated? Why did the Hypotheticals wait to spin Mars, and what made them choose this particular moment in our history?”

  “You have answers to that?”

  One of his handlers knocked at the door and opened it. A balding guy in a tailored black suit. He spoke to Wun but he looked at me: “Just a reminder. We have the EU rep coming in. Five minutes.” He held the door wide, expectantly. I stood up.

  “Next time,” Wun said.

  “Soon, I hope.”

  “As soon as I can arrange it.”

  It was late and I was done for the day. I left through the north door. On my way to the parking lot I stopped at the wooden hoarding where the new addition to Perihelion was under construction. Between gaps in the security wall I could see a plain cinder-block building, huge external pressure tanks, pipes as thick as barrels plumbed through concrete embrasures. The ground was littered with yellow PTFE insulation and coiled copper tubing. A foreman in a white hard hat barked orders at men pushing wheelbarrows, men with safety goggles and steel-toed boots.

  Men building an incubator for a new kind of life. This was where the replicators would be grown in cradles of liquid helium and prepped for their launch into the cold places of the universe: our heirs, in a sense, bound to live longer and travel farther than human beings ever would. Our final dialogue with the universe. Unless E.D. had his way and canceled the project entirely.

  Molly and I took a beach walk that weekend.

  It was a cloudless late-October Saturday. We had hiked a quarter mile of cigarette-stub-littered sand before the day got uncomfortably warm and the sun grew insistent, the ocean giving back the light in dazzling pinpoints, as if shoals of diamonds were swimming far offshore. Molly wore shorts and sandals and a white cotton T-shirt that had begun to stick to her body in alluring ways, a visor cap with the bill pulled down to shade her eyes.

  “I never did understand this,” she said, swiping her wrist across her forehead, turning back to face her own tracks in the sand.

  “What’s that, Moll?”

  “The sun. I mean the sunlight. This light. It’s fake, everybody says, but God, the heat: the heat is real.”

  “The sun’s not fake exactly. The sun we see isn’t the real sun, but this light would have originated there. It’s managed by the Hypotheticals, the wavelengths stepped down and filtered—”

  “I know, but I mean the way it rides the sky. Sunrise, sunset. If it’s only a projection, how come it looks the same from Canada and South America? If the Spin barrier is only a few hundred miles up?”

  I told her what Jason had once told me: the fake sun wasn’t an illusion projected on a screen, it was a managed replica of sunlight passing through the screen from a source ninety million miles away, like a ray-trace program rendered on a colossal scale.

  “Pretty fucking elaborate stage trick,” Molly said.

  “If they did it differently we’d all have died years ago. The planetary ecology needs a twenty-four-hour day.” We had already lost a number of species that depended on moonlight to feed or mate.

  “But it’s a lie.”

  “If you want to call it that.”

  “A lie, I call it a lie. I’m standing here with the light of a lie on my face. A lie you can get skin cancer from. But I still don’t understand it. I guess we won’t, until we understand the Hypotheticals. If we ever do. Which I doubt.”

  You don’t understand a lie, Molly said as we paralleled an ancient board-walk gone white with salt, until you understand the motivation behind it. She said this glancing sidelong at me, eyes shadowed under her cap, sending me messages I couldn’t decipher.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon in my air-conditioned rental, reading, playing music, but Moll was restless and I hadn’t quite come to terms with her raid on my computer, another indecipherable event. I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.

  What worried me was that she remained deeply unpredictable, as Spin-bent as the rest of us. I couldn’t buy her gifts: there were things she wanted, but unless she had vocally admired something in a shop window I couldn’t guess what they were. She kept her deepest needs deeply obscure. Maybe, like most secretive people, she assumed I was keeping important secrets of my own.

  We had just finished dinner and started cleaning up when the phone rang. Molly picked it up while I dried my hands. “Uh-huh,” she said. “No, he’s here. Just wait a second.” She muted the phone and said, “It’s Jason. Do you want to talk to him? He sounds all freaked out.”

  “Of course I’ll talk to him.”

  I took the receiver and waited. Molly gave me a long look, then rolled her eyes and left the kitchen. Privacy. “Jase? What’s up?”

  “I need you here, Tyler.” His voice was tense, constricted. “Now.”

  “Got a problem?”

  “Yes, I have a fucking problem. And I need you to come fix it.”

  “It’s that urgent?”

  “Would I be calling you if it wasn’t?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Home.”

  “Okay, listen, it’ll take some time if the traffic’s bad—”

  “Just get here,” he said.

  So I told Molly I had some urgent work to catch up on. She smiled, or maybe sneered, and said, “What work is that? Somebody missed an appointment? Delivering a baby? What?”

  “I’m a doctor, Moll. Professional privilege.”

  “Being a doctor doesn’t mean you’re Jason Lawton’s lapdog. You don’t have to fetch every time he throws a stick.”

  “I’m sorry about cutting the evening short. Do you want me to give you a lift somewhere, or—?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll stay here until you’re back.” Staring at me defiantly, belligerently, almost wanting me to object.

  But I couldn’t argue. That would mean I didn’t trust her. And I did trust her. Mostly. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’ll curl up on the sofa and watch the tube. If that’s okay with you?”

  “As long as you’re not bored.”

  “I promise I won’t be bored.”

  Jason’s barely furnished apartment was twenty miles up the highway, and on the way there I had to detour around a crime scene, a failed roadside attack on a bank truck that had killed a carful of Canadian tourists. Jase buzzed me into his building and when I knocked at his door he called out, “It’s open.”

  The big front room was as spare as it ever had been, a parquet desert in which Jase had set up his Bedouin camp. He was lying on the sofa. The floor lamp next to the sofa put him in a hard, unflattering light. He was pale and his forehead was dotted with sweat. His eyes glittered.

  “I thought you might not come,” he said. “Thought maybe your hick girlfriend wouldn’t let you out of the house.”

  I told him about the police detour. Then I said, “Do me a favor. Please don’t talk about Molly that way.”

  “Please don’t refer to her as an Idaho shitkicker with trailer-park sensibilities? Sure enough. Anything to oblige.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Interesting question. Many possible answers. Look.”

  He stood up.

  It was a poor, feeble, ratcheting process. Jase was still tall, still slender, but the physical grace that had once seemed so effortless had deserted him. His arms flailed. His legs, when he managed to bring himself upright, jittered under him like jointed stilts. He blinked convulsively. “This is what’s wrong with me,” he said. Then, the anger coming on in another convulsive movement, his emotional state as volatile as his limbs: “Look at me! F-fuck, Tyler, look at me!”

  “Sit back down, Jase. Let me examine you.” I had brought my medical kit. I rolled up his sleeve and wrapped a BP cuff around his skinny arm. I could feel the muscle contracting under it, barely controlled.

  His blood pressure was high and his pulse was fast. “You’ve been
taking your anticonvulsants?”

  “Of course I’ve been taking the fucking anticonvulsants.”

  “On schedule? No double-dosing? Because if you take too many, Jase, you’re doing yourself more harm than good.”

  Jason sighed impatiently. Then he did something surprising. He reached behind my head and grabbed a handful of my hair, painfully, and tugged it down until my face was close to his. Words came out of him, a raging river of them.

  “Don’t get pedantic on me, Tyler. Don’t do that, because I can’t afford it right now. Maybe you have issues about my treatment. I’m sorry, but this is no time to take your fucking principles out for a walk. Too much is at stake. E.D. is flying in to Perihelion in the morning. E.D. thinks he has a trump card to play. E.D. would rather shut us down than let me ascend to his fucking throne. I can’t let that happen, and look at me: do I look like I’m in any condition to commit an act of patricide?” His grip tightened until it hurt—he was still that strong—then he let go and with his other hand pushed me away. “So FIX ME! That’s what you’re for, isn’t it?”

  I pulled up a chair and sat silently until he lapsed back into the sofa, exhausted by his own outburst. He watched me take a syringe out of my kit and load it from a small brown bottle.

  “What’s that?”

  “Temporary relief.” In fact it was a harmless B-complex vitamin shot laced with a minor tranquilizer. Jason looked at it suspiciously but let me deliver it into his arm. A tiny bead of blood followed the needle out.

  “You already know what I have to tell you,” I said. “There’s no cure for this problem.”

  “No earthly cure.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know what it means.”

  He was talking about Wun Ngo Wen’s longevity process.

  The reconstruction, Wun had said, was also a cure for a long list of genetic disabilities. It would edit the AMS loop out of Jason’s DNA, inhibiting the rogue proteins that were eroding his nervous system. “But that would take weeks,” I said, “and anyway, I can’t condone the idea of making you a guinea pig for an untested procedure.”