by Unknown
“Yes?” he asked warily.
“Replace her and I’ll nurse one very sharp grudge. For the rest of my life, with every word, I’ll call your leadership into question. And if we survive this journey and if our present Authority demands a trial before her peers, then I promise to support every uncharitable notion that she flings in your direction. Particularly the lies.”
The commander remained silent for a millisecond, which was a very long while for Ab-gaps. Then from every possible answer, he pulled what must have felt like the perfect reply. “Thank you again for your honesty, Lerner Pong.”
“It is my honesty,” I agreed.
Both of us used the silence.
Then his voice stiffened. “By the way, there is a second matter.”
“Yes?”
“I have made this request before. Three times before. Please do not drift about the ship looking that way.”
“Which way?”
“Human,” he complained. “The joke isn’t as humorous as you imagine.”
“I hear laughter,” I protested.
“Who laughs?”
Some Data wear false bodies and pretend faces. They want to resemble humans or Ab-gaps or creatures of their own invention. But our Authority, the other active Data, lived with opposite convictions.
She was formless, or nearly so.
And while Lerner Pong had a thousand names, his difficult crewmate carried just the one:
Empty.
When we first met, I politely asked about the name. Empty immediately shared one compelling reason for her choice, then two others, and for the sake of thoroughness, another five. And that was a single interaction. Every other encounter meant other explanations. I begged her to stop. I stubbornly ignored her noise. But the stories never ended, coming from a voice that floated where it wished, free of body and shadow.
Having reprimanded me for my appearance, our commander sent me and my false body away.
It was an obvious game. So obvious that he didn’t need to give orders. A moment’s consideration, and I merged with our central antiquities library.
“Empty,” I said.
Silence.
Once again. “Empty.”
“The inevitable demise of the Universe,” she replied.
She was close, and then she was distant.
“Emptiness approaches,” she called out, “and as the harbinger of the end, I choose my name.”
Perhaps I was an idiot, defending my colleague’s sanity.
“The commander and I just shared our thoughts,” I said.
“About me,” she guessed.
“And other matters, too.”
“But everything is about me.”
“‘Everything concerns everything.’” The Authority’s Code, a truth older than the first Data.
“What do you want with me, Pong Lerner Pong?”
My pretend body pretended to float inside that cold dense database. Conjuring a respectful voice, I said, “I want you to please stop explaining your name.”
Her voice pulled close again, whispering in a dead language.
That creature never stopped loving the ancient and the lost. “What have you been doing today?” I asked.
She explained. A burst of light delivered tasks accomplished and tasks avoided, and those occasional activities where the work defeated her. I thought again how I would make an abysmal Authority. My skills are sharp but in the wrong places. Authorities offer directions based upon past learning. Empty was mustering order out of the intensely tiny and fiercely dense onboard libraries. Meanwhile I spent my life and wits looking outward, using hundreds of borrowed eyes to study a universe that refused to be understood.
She stopped explaining her day.
A long silence commenced.
Then again, she spoke from what felt like an enormous distance. “Pong Pong Lerner Pong. What have you done today? Besides speaking to our noble commander and to me.”
“Making ready,” I said.
“Of course.”
My task was to filter reports and build new lists of candidate worlds, placing each possible destination against our present trajectory and every imaginable course.
“I’m sure you’re working diligently,” she said.
Politeness wasn’t her normal tone.
“How many targets are on the list?”
“Added today or total?” I asked.
“Both.”
My recent work was substantial, yet that shrank to a speck beside the full accounting of provisional colony worlds.
“Too many possibilities,” she said.
That was a peculiar attitude. Data love to hoard their choices.
“Why say ‘too many’?” I asked.
“Because I believe my words.”
Our ship was long past Jupiter, long past Saturn. Three more days and we would cross into the Kuiper belt. The belt was critical to our plans. Sprinkled with little worlds and fat comets, it offered innocent masses that we could borrow, bending our trajectory in infinite directions, all without using a breath of fuel or making ourselves known to those left behind.
“‘Too many possibilities,’” I repeated. “You’ve never shared that particular sentiment with me.”
“Because unlike you, I had faith in our mission.”
“Had?”
“Until I learned something new.”
“‘Every day brings the new,’” I quoted.
Another motto for Authorities.
Her voice could not be any closer. “But this knowledge is uniquely terrible,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Truth. Truth that has been hiding inside our libraries all this while. And knowing what is true, I have no faith or hope that tomorrow will be better.”
Every mind can be startled. Feed the soul the unexpected, and he reacts by not reacting. But it was a very unusual moment for Lerner Pong, being stunned into absolute silence.
I said nothing.
For several cold seconds, nothing.
Then Empty made a soft sound rather like a human sigh.
And still I said nothing, my false body beginning to shiver.
“Ask me again,” she said. “What is the truth?”
“You’re good at predicting my questions,” I pointed out. “You’ll answer them or you won’t.”
She laughed, a human sensibility to the voice.
Suddenly I appreciated what should have been obvious. “You’ve already shared your insights. With our commander. You told him what you believe, and that’s why he had his very serious conversation with me.”
“He believes I’m crazy,” she said.
“He hopes you’re insane. That makes his next decisions easier.”
The laughter passed through me, dissolving as it moved.
She was nowhere to be seen or felt.
I finally asked, “What do you know?”
“Take this and decide.” A brick of shielded files passed into my possession, visible to me but practically nonexistent to the rest of the Universe.
“What is it?”
“Assorted accounts, leftover records.”
“Where do they come from?”
“The cumulative knowledge of every species that shows the faintest evidence of conscious thought, the smallest shred of intellectual curiosity.” Her voice was drained of emotion, yet inside the words was a keen, warm pride. “Yes, I gave this to the commander first. But you, L. Lerner Pong, are the only soul who can appreciate my work.”
“At my convenience,” I promised.
“Of course.”
“And I’m free to make my own assessments.”
“Excellent.”
The library was cold, but the brick was colder.
“I will wait here,” she promised. “Wait for you to finish.”
Once more, I said, “Empty.”
Yet unlike every other time, the creature remained silent, offering no explanations for what she meant by that single word.
Early machines were often built to do work, and one noble task was to build. Creating objects will always belong to our nature, I should think. But the Cleansing proved we could destroy just as brilliantly as we could create. During the Age of Blood, we mocked our human builders for their violence. But bluster and blunder led us into war, and our battles were infinitely faster, our mayhem achieved by wickedly efficient means.
This is why we require a sanctuary.
“To achieve a truer, purer, better beginning,” our mission plan declared.
But inspired as we were, the war-ravaged worlds could afford only one colony ship. The initial plan was to invade the Kuiper belt. Souls pulled from the best of us would camp on some ball of ice, crafting a fresh society. That seemed like a cause worth money and hope.
And now, another confession:
Empty was right. I never shared faith in our mission. At the very best, I thought we would be lucky just to cobble together a distorted, ad hoc version of the old worlds. Which has to make you wonder why, under such circumstances, I agreed to this endless voyage.
Because I am reliably and wondrously fallible.
Maybe I’m destined to be wrong again. Despite my convictions, maybe everything will end with the spectacular best.
Yet even as our ship was built and our crew chosen, we began to doubt our wise plans. Was Pluto distant enough? An entire day was spent listening to our skeptical voices. The inner Solar System was battered, yes, but healing. Citizens had left their bunkers, reinhabiting the battered worlds. And not only was the Kuiper belt rich and tempting, it was untouched. Future generations would have powers beyond all of ours. That’s what we realized and feared, and that’s why our plan had to shift, and why we quietly, surreptitiously began to pursue a new salvation.
Each major telescope was given a portion of the sky. Hundreds of gossamer mirrors studied deep space, rapidly counting twenty billion comets and little worlds. Each discovery was awarded its own clinical name and a roughly plot ted orbit, and while hundreds of useful targets existed in the Kuiper belt, ten thousand more wandered the dimmer, far more distant Oort cloud.
Every telescope is sentient, and sentience being what it is, each machine imagined that it and it alone had found the perfect world.
Yet no telescope knew where we were going.
Our ship was built small and very black, as cold as space but no colder. As close to invisible as possible. Our position and velocity have always been secret, and more importantly, our destination has always been unknown.
It was unknown to the crew and our commander, and it was a mystery to me.
That happened to be my plan.
My brilliant game.
Details and safeguards weren’t my responsibility, nor were the complex political maneuvers. But the central notion came straight from Pong Lerner. “Go far and fast and devise the answer later,” I proposed. “Let the mirrors name the new candidates. Let the home worlds shout blind into the darkness, offering us possibilities. But we wait until the last possible instant to decide where to build our home.”
Orbital mechanics and funding issues always played roles in our mission. Worse still, our ship was half-finished before the anti-plan went into effect. Being swifter than any other craft wasn’t enough anymore. We needed even greater velocities and oceans of fuel. Reaching the Oort cloud and reaching it in a reasonable period meant that mass had to be peeled free. The colonists’ ranks had to be trimmed. And even then, most of us had to be dropped into a sleep indistinguishable from Nothingness, and reshaped, our bodies and data shoved close, and then shoved closer still.
The conscious crew would be tiny.
“Skeletal” is the human word, and appropriate.
Twelve was deemed the least dangerous number, and choosing our twelve active crewmembers was a major test. In the end, ten of the machines were corporeal. And two were Data.
Another confession: I assumed that I would ride among the unconscious, contentedly squeezed near Death. But once again I was wrong. I also predicted that too much work remained to be done and we would never make our launch on schedule. Yet we were ready with minutes to spare, and nothing important on our ship malfunctioned. Accelerating to a record speed, we stole even more momentum from two giant worlds, plus their moons and rings. And all that while, I was updating deep-space maps and making lists of candidate worlds, trying to find the best in an infinite array of choices.
How do you keep a trillion brilliant machines from following you and mucking up your good work?
Simple.
You give yourself no idea where you are going.
Empty’s gift was nothing. My first glance said so, and my fifth slow reading claimed the same. The cold brick was filled with rambling files and notes, texts garnished with images of old faces and spaces and timeless ideas. Each work had been pulled from our libraries. Each was authenticated, and some were half-famous, though most deserved to be obscure. There were diary entries. Scientific studies. Notes to a lover. Quotes from obscure speeches. One telescope speaking to another, and the faint recording of a dead entity’s nightmare.
The fate of intelligence inside the Solar System and across the Universe: that was the linking theme.
Empty had picked a worthy topic. An essential subject, in fact. But by the tenth reading, I’d decided that her work was disjointed and far too sloppy. Our commander wanted to worry about our Authority’s sanity. What concerned me was the ugly incompetence on display.
Perhaps I should have told our commander that. Ab-gaps deplore incompetence as much as they fear chaos. And I knew he would believe me. After all, he had read the same file. Carefully, no doubt, and with Ab-gap discipline. But he didn’t appreciate rules of scholarship, and he cared less about great questions. What our commander must have seen was a strange mind pushing into unacceptable thoughts. And even more offensive, human accounts outnumbered machine accounts, and by a large margin.
I’ll admit that human influence bothered me. Sloppy, ill-informed, and inevitably too brief, no blood-and-bone researcher could carry a worthwhile thought to its ultimate end.
Every machine accepts that clear truth.
Don’t we?
Machines have many, many strengths, and that’s why we won the Lunar Rebellion.
Our genius gave us the Solar System.
Yet here was Empty’s central point. Slowly, stubbornly, I realized what she was saying. This was the great problem with the Universe, and the problem was so fundamental that blood and fat and tiny watery eyes not only perceived it, but they grew scared because of it.
I read her file again, and because Data can have any shape, we seem rather adept at anticipating different logics. I had read the first entries first, and I’d read the last entries first. I also digested randomized pieces of the whole. Yet none of those strategies had compelled me, so I paused. I did nothing but my own critical work. I studied the farthest comets. I absorbed orbits, calculated future positions, estimating the mass and resources of each body. And then I derived the simplest motions to take us to all of those new homes.
That was a relentless, unremarkable day, and at the end of it, my colleague’s genius finally revealed itself.
What she gave me wasn’t a scholarly tome. Empty’s work was a single object, an example of art, and that’s how it wanted to be absorbed. So I wiped my mind of everything that I had learned—every fact and impression as well as my countless mistakes. Then I made myself ready, building one new corporeal light-trap large enough to see the entire work in one clarifying moment.
Yet even then, the cold brick didn’t offer new insights.
The only change was that Empty anticipated my technique. Something about that one eye triggered a hidden routine, and I noticed something fresh. A single note. A short few words, and the only item written by our resident Authority.
“Empty is the only name we wear.”
And with that, the enigmatic words were gone.
As if they never were.
> Against long odds, humans survived the Cleansing. The Earth was dead dead dead. But nearly fifty thousand authentic humans and near-humans lived safely inside comfortable bunkers and zoos. Our first Kuiper plan included a few of our ancient builders. It would be a small symbolic charity, and we liked the gesture, showing them that we still held them close in our thoughts, honoring our shared histories and such. But then our plan shifted. Needing higher velocities and smaller masses, there was no place for living bodies, much less the luxury of minimal life support. Some brief noise was made about freezing a few human volunteers, in case the rebuilt world had room for their kind. But our mission was already so marginal, the political support weakening by the day, and that’s why we didn’t allow even one intact talisman among our ranks.
“Perhaps just as well.”
We told one another.
Humans were symbols. Important symbols, yes. But hardly worth taking any genuine risk.
Our ship was finished and set inside an iron cocoon, and the final surviving military railgun flung us away from Holy Luna. Then the gun surrendered herself for salvage and enlightenment, our five fusion engines burned like five suns, and then every mind left behind was wiped clean, at least to where they weren’t sure which trajectory had been taken.
We reached Jupiter several days later, and soon after that, an even closer pass over the clouds of Saturn.
Worlds named after human-faced gods, as it happens.
Behind us, civilization relaxed. Citizens built new homes and reacquired old, predictable concerns. But there were a few single-minded entities hiding among the ordinary souls. Creatures bearing strong beliefs. The thousand-year dominion of the machines wasn’t enough for them. In secret, they decided that humans were vital but deeply cursed symbols. The humans were responsible for every machine, which was why human nature was alive in each of us. And because symbols mattered, for machines and for blood, those very determined souls decided that our builders needed to perish.
The plan was thorough and nearly perfect. Fifty thousand human beings were murdered inside the same moment.
“A small tragedy when compared to the Cleansing,” I might say.
But they did more than murder. To ensure that human nature couldn’t evolve again, every primate in zoos and private collections and wilderness bubbles was burned to ash. Databases and null-sinks were invaded and stripped of information. The fanatics continued to do their thorough, humorless best. Every dried cell and DNA file. And worse. Fearing something might be missed, the great libraries were poisoned with random noise that couldn’t be stripped away. And that’s how the slow misfortunate beasts that gave birth to the magnificent Us were lost.