Clarkesworld: Year Seven

by Neil Clarke

  The status glyph in one corner of the workroom—invisible to me now without my glasses, but after five years as familiar as the furniture—only drove that home. Makemake Station, rendered as a football-sized globe. The muon storage rings were just faint lines describing great circles on the sphere’s surface; the fusion reactor a tiny, indistinct blob; the magnetic horns of our transmitter, too small to be seen and represented only by an icon. The habitat we lived in was just a dot on a near-invisible tether, sweeping around that giant sphere like the hand of a clock, doing a circuit every half hour.

  Almost all of Makemake Station by volume was accounted for by the millions of cubic kilometers of heavy water inside the sphere. Neutrinos were ghost particles, easy to lose if you didn’t have a whole sea to listen with. Hadil claimed he could hear it sloshing, for all that it was kilometers away and separated from us by vacuum; I dreamed about it sometimes, swimming in a pitch darkness broken only by tiny flashes like fireflies.

  “Dike,” Hadil said.

  “Yes?”

  He looked at me with both eyebrows raised. Sweat was beading on his temples. “I think I’ve figured it out.”

  “Really?” I walked over to him and tried to grab the glasses off his face. “Show me!”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Hadil said, fending me off. “Or try mine, maybe they’ll work for you.” His old pair was still sitting on the shelf, next to his gently steaming coffee.

  “No thanks, I’d rather not borrow your headache,” I said. “Just tell me.”

  “This signal the Cây Cúc picked up,” Hadil said, speaking so fast he was almost breathless. “It’s like a virus but more so. Like artificial life. It can rewrite itself to adapt to new architectures.”

  “It evolves?” I leaned against the back of his chair.

  “I suppose,” Hadil said. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Our hardware’s a lot faster than what they’ve got on the Cây Cúc. So it’s cycling faster. We’ve got an infection.”

  “Start shutting everything down,” I said. My head felt a little light. “Shut down everything that’s already infected or connected to anything that’s infected. We’ll restore from a clean backup.” At least life support wasn’t threatened.

  Hadil pulled the glasses off abruptly and threw them down. I jumped aside as broken glass and tiny electronics littered the room.

  “Hadil, what’s wrong?”

  “Flicker,” Hadil said, thickly. His scalp was shiny through his close-cropped hair. “I can’t feel my legs.” His voice sounded both slurred and very small, as if not quite certain what he was saying.

  “You can’t—” I grabbed him by the shoulders, too hard. “Okay, okay. Let me get you to your bunk.” I reached for the other pair of glasses to put them on, run a medical diagnostic, but Hadil stopped me, clutching at my wrist.

  “Don’t,” he said. He was trembling.

  I tucked them into the collar of my shirt instead. “Okay. Let’s get you lying down and then you can talk me through why not.”

  Helping him into his bunk was difficult. His legs dangled, dead weight. He drank the water I gave him, though I had to help him sit up. Lying down again, he seemed to recover a little. He seemed even younger than he was.

  “Your grandpa’s talking again,” he said.

  I fished the glasses from my collar, but Hadil stopped me again.

  “I’ll have to eventually,” I said, as gently as I could. Without the glasses, I had no way to interact with Makemake Station. No computation, no communications, no medical telemetry, no helpful wiki. “Is it the flicker?”

  He stared at me, unblinking, sweating freely. “My head hurts.”

  Strobe lights at some frequencies could induce seizures—or I thought so, at least, without the wiki I couldn’t be sure. I suggested this theory to Hadil but he shook his head, and then winced.

  “I feel drunk,” he said. He was speaking with exaggerated care now, slow and deliberate. “Your grandpa’s still talking,” he said, then pointed at his head. No glasses, no little speakers tucked behind the ear.

  “What’s he saying?” Stupid question. Was I feeding a delusion? I was really starting to miss the wiki.

  “Gibberish,” Hadil said. He closed his eyes.

  “Just get some rest,” I babbled. My basic medical training hadn’t covered anything like this. It didn’t need to: Earth could provide emergency support within a day. “I’ll call Da Nang, we’ll get help.”

  “They figured it out,” Hadil muttered, too quickly as if he was trying to get the words out. “Figured us out.”

  “Who?”

  “The aliens, Dike,” Hadil said. His eyes were still closed, as if unwilling to face his own words.

  “The aliens who sent the signal?”

  “They are the signal.” Hadil said. “The human brain is a computational substrate. They’ve adapted to our architecture.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said, automatically, then winced. “How would they even—”

  “Listen,” Hadil said. He opened his eyes. His pupils were very wide, frightened. I realized I was holding his hand. “They hacked me. I can feel it. It’s jumbling up my—”

  He paused for a moment, as if expecting me to interrupt again, but I didn’t. When I touched his temple he didn’t react. The vein was pulsing violently.

  “Don’t look into the glasses,” Hadil said, finally. “They must hack the brain through the eye. The visual cortex. It’s transmitting some sort of compressed signal, that’s got to be why the displays are flickering.”

  “Without the glasses, I can’t call for medical assistance,” I said. I tried to put motherly reassurance in my voice, tried to remember what Mom had sounded like when I was young and broke my arm falling out of a tree. Make a plan. “I need to be able to run the diagnostics on you, I need to update Da Nang that something weird is going on—at least that we may have been infected with a virus from the Cây Cúc— ”

  “It’s not a virus,” Hadil said. He sounded very tired. “Not infection. Invasion.” I squeezed his hand and listened to him breathe, but he didn’t say anything more.

  When he died it was sudden. He wheezed twice, horribly, and then he was gone. I closed his eyes, my hands trembling and cold.

  My head was too full of ghosts.

  When I was an undergrad at Nha Trang, before I came up with the plan, I’d drive down to Ba Ho once every few weeks. Early in the morning before the tourists came, I’d climb the rocks beside the waterfall and then leap off with my eyes closed, nothing but the wind in my face and the hammering of my heart. Blind, terrified, exhilarated. I felt like that now.

  Don’t put on the glasses, Hadil said.

  I didn’t want to look at his body. I went back to the workroom and sat in his chair instead of mine. Glass crunched under my shoes.

  The other pair of glasses still sat on the shelf. If I put them on, I would see all the screens and displays that filled this empty room. The ghost of my grandfather, standing in the corner, perhaps still talking about the wife and child he left behind.

  The telemetry would tell me that one of Makemake’s operators was dead. There would be data on his death. I could find out what had really happened. Explain his hallucinations, if that’s what they were. A stroke? A seizure?

  There would be a clock to tell me how much time was left until I could send a message back to Da Nang Mission Control. It would take five hours for my message to reach them, and Earth would spin Da Nang into line of sight within—how long? An hour? Two? The Update from the Cây Cúc would be already queued for automatic forwarding. I could hold that back and send a call for help instead.

  Unless Hadil was right, and then if I put the glasses on, I would die like he did.

  Was Rais still undead and unaging? Were they all dead on the Cây Cúc? If the aliens could infect the human brain—many of the colonists could have been wearing a slightly older version of the augmented reality glasses. If the vulnerability was in the visual cortex then an
y kind of display might do. Any screen, physical or virtual. A book, a phone, a photo. Like the one that Rais always had in his hand.

  But Rais was still alive when he sent the message, and many people would have been exposed by then, but there was no indication anyone had died. Maybe their hardware was just too slow. Despite us sending them tech schematics every year and them using the ship’s fabricators, they couldn’t keep up with time-dilated technological change. A lot of the hardware on the ship was eighty years out of date.

  Your grandma hated him for leaving, Mom said. But we don’t need fathers, you and me.

  Rais would send another message tomorrow, but that wouldn’t arrive at Makemake Station for a couple of months.

  I hope you have kids someday, Rais said.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. My own voice was shockingly loud in the silence.

  Hadil said it wasn’t a virus. More than a virus. Something smart, something that could explore and experiment. Find new territories, expand into them, adjust the terrain to their liking.

  Informational life. Ghosts. Like infectious ideas that echoed in our heads until we could not think of anything else, until we forgot how to move, how to beat our hearts, how to breathe. Did they know they were killing us? Did they even know we existed? That there was a whole plane of physical reality that lay beneath theirs?

  Rais could have stayed behind, said Grandma Abena. He could have turned down the adventure. He was selfish.

  They must have made him go, said Mom. Maybe they threatened to kill us if he stayed.

  “You’re both dead, give it a rest,” I said. “He was barely a grown man. He ran, that was all.” Just leaped into the unknown, eyes closed and heart hammering.

  Was that what it was like to be a ghost? Jumping off the ledge, not knowing if it was water or rock at the bottom, terrified and laughing? Were they conscious? They could only be conscious when they had something to haunt. Crossing light-years as signals, riding pulsars across the galaxy—

  There couldn’t be more than an hour left before Makemake Station automatically forwarded the last Update to Earth. I needed to switch that off.

  I don’t want you to tell me about him, Mom said. I don’t need to know.

  Mom had insisted on that, when I finally told her my plan for contacting Rais. I waited until the last moment to tell her, just before I left for Makemake Station. That was only a year before she died. “It was Grandma who would have really wanted to know,” I said.

  You don’t know what I wanted, said Grandma Abena. You were just a child.

  When I got your first message, Rais said, I knew it couldn’t be, but I thought you were Abena. You look just like her. Only older.

  Maybe the ghosts were mayflies. Maybe generations passed in the twenty minutes it took them to kill Hadil. His coffee wasn’t even cold yet.

  “I know you’re in me already,” I said. “My ghosts aren’t usually this literal.”

  I put the glasses on. Decisions made in haste. Look, grandfather, we have something in common after all.

  We were going to the colony as a family, Rais said. That was the plan. I’m so sorry it didn’t work out that way.

  I didn’t notice the flickering anymore, or perhaps it had stopped. My head was pounding.

  He was afraid, Grandma Abena said. The stars are wonderful, but if you lower your eyes to ground level you’ll see the men with guns in the night.

  The clock said I had ten minutes left to the automated Update to Earth. Less than I had thought.

  After I grew up, Mom said, I didn’t waste any more time thinking about that man. I got on with my life, and so should you.

  I disabled the scheduled transmission, reoriented the magnetic horns away from Earth, told them to always point out into empty space. To stop tracking their targets, to forget. Such a simple thing, but my hands were slick with sweat and trembling when I was done.

  Could the ghosts reset this? Could they manipulate the system, move the horns back? They could, but why would they understand the universe of ships and stations and worlds? Could they even find Earth again? I invoked superuser access, deleted the memory of Earth’s path from Makemake Station. Would it be enough?

  Maybe they wouldn’t care. Maybe even if they managed to get the transmissions working again, they would be happy to spill out endlessly into the dark, neutrinos passing intangibly through rock and vacuum alike. Maybe that was how they got into the signal that the Cây Cúc picked up in the first place. Someone else, somewhere, impotent and desperate as me.

  I couldn’t feel my legs anymore.

  My arms shook as I lowered myself to the floor. Something cut my hand painfully when I rested my weight on it. A shard from Hadil’s broken glasses. I wanted to go sit with Hadil in his room, but I didn’t think I could get that far. My chest felt hollow.

  One more thing, Hadil reminded.

  With Makemake silent, Da Nang would send a team within a day. As soon as they entered the station, their glasses or helmets would connect with Makemake’s network and open themselves to invasion. They’d probably re-establish communications with Earth before they realized something was wrong.

  I started an imago recording of myself, looping it to display everywhere in the station. I’d have to keep it short. It was getting hard to breathe, and the first responders would not have much time before they died.

  It’s just like the waterfall, but with your pockets full of stones when you jump.

  “If you’re seeing this, you’re already dead,” I began, and made myself a ghost.

  Across the Terminator

  David Tallerman

  “I’m telling you, it’s alive!”

  Fasbender shook the flask as though it really were some living thing he was trying to subdue, yet its contents looked more than anything like dirty water—it was Hank’s pointing this out that had provoked his outburst in the first place.

  At forty-three, Fasbender was the oldest member of their three-man team. With his shock of prematurely white hair and pale skin scarred by some vindictive childhood illness, he tended to look even older—especially when he was seized, as now, with what Hank considered his “mad scientist fits.”

  “So what is it?” Hank asked.

  “I don’t know. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know. I don’t have the lab equipment. I don’t have equipment for anything like this.”

  An old grievance. It wasn’t so much that Blue Glacier was under-equipped. Indeed, while the base was being established, money had been thrown at it in mind-boggling quantities. But without a specific mandate, no one had known exactly what to buy with those inflated budgets. They’d requested tools, machines, and software according to guesses of what might be useful down the line. In the end, whether from funding cuts, space restrictions on shuttles, or pure bureaucratic obstinacy, much of it had never materialized.

  These days, to Fasbender’s endless frustration, nobody ever asked what they needed.

  “I might be able to rustle something up,” Hank said helplessly. “If you can explain what you need and why.”

  Fasbender just glared from beneath flamboyant eyebrows, as though reprimanding an obstinate child.

  “Oh come on. If it’s something important, they’ll listen. It is important, right?”

  “Yes,” Fasbender said. “It’s very important. It’s too important for red tape, for protocols, for orders signed in triplicate. It’s too important to sit on. That’s why, Hank, I’m going to ask you to do something you really won’t want to do.”

  Ever since their arrival, Hank had loved and despised going outside in equal measure. There was something about the uncompromised desolation that stirred him, that took him out of himself, even in his worst moods. The pocked surface of Shackleton Crater peeled away in every direction, a void beneath vast skies, its jagged rim blindingly bright compared to the absolute darkness of its depths. It was lonely, utterly lonely—and breathtaking.

  Yet here he was, spoiling it. There was the bit he hated.
The rover bounced and lurched in the loose regolith, churning dust beneath its bubble wheels, traveling within a chalky cloud that followed like some agitated ghost. Out here, Hank always felt like the worst kind of tourist.

  He sighed. At least he was lucky enough to see firsthand what the vast majority would only ever experience through the feeds and LOsim. So why was he about to do something that might—no, had to—jeopardize that?

  Because if Fasbender’s right, this is too big not to. So suck it up, Schakowsky.

  Behind him, Blue Glacier sat like a basking toad. Ahead, Yang Liwei loomed nearer. It was easy, and misleading, to make assumptions about the societies that had constructed each one from their eccentricities of design. The Chinese base might be brutal in its functionality of form, but Fasbender was right about one thing: Yang Liwei was a scientific research station in a way that Blue Glacier wasn’t and had never been intended to be.

  He drove slowly to negate any suggestion of hostility, however insane such a threat might be. There was a patch of churned ground before the entrance, a scar from Yang Liwei’s construction. Hank let the rover grind to a halt in front of it and swung to the ground. Dust spat around his booted feet, but inside the suit he felt and heard nothing, and saw only what the spotlights and his photocromic visor allowed. He took one awkward step, then another, and wondered what the hell he was expecting. For two years, the US and Chinese astronautic teams had sat opposite each other, engaged in what had always seemed like the geopolitical equivalent of a staring contest. Would they vaporize him? Ignore him? Did they even know he was out here?

  Hank took a third step. His helmet mike spat static.

  A female voice said, “Commander Schakowsky, welcome to Yang Liwei Lunar Science Station. May we ask what took you so long to visit?”

  “You have to understand, we had orders. Well, we still have. Only, our scientist thinks that after what Crazy Bessie brought in . . . ” Hank realized he probably wasn’t making much sense. “Bessie’s our robot. She’s one of the prototype AI-led rovers Holier has been developing for the Mars program. It took us a while to beat the kinks out of her programming, though. Like trying to train a too-smart dog. Ah—”