The first thing they did was produce the second generation of Kids—the first generation had been left behind on Earth, doomed to die in captivity as lawsuits about who they belonged to crawled through the courts and inquisitive scientists found it impossible to keep their itchy fingers off them. The Kids were superbrights, tall, fragile children with towering IQs and a penchant for terrible jokes. They were force-grown through a brief childhood and briefer adolescence, and then let loose to play around with Professor Potter’s work and other, even more esoteric, stuff.
Time passed. Generations of Kids came and went—they had short, brilliant lives. The Writers—Potter and her students and their hangers-on—rewrote themselves into ever more fantastical forms. Some of them could survive in vacuum. They woke up the colonists they’d stolen and explained the situation to them. They invited them to stay, but said the ones who wanted to return home would be put back into suspension, loaded onto a ship, and left in orbit of one of the more remote colonies, the ship’s navigation system carefully trashed so as not to lead the Bureau back to the Colony. Some wanted to go back, but most elected to stay and join in the Great Adventure.
By the time Connie brought me here, the Colony was a mature and functioning enterprise the Bureau would have been insanely proud of, had it not been founded by wanted criminals carrying out proscribed experiments. The population had swollen to around the optimal two million mark, the majority of them startlingly different from the human norm, for reasons practical or satirical or simply because they could. The Writers kept Writing. By now, it was as easy for them to alter the genome of a life form as it was for the rest of us to jot a shopping list. Later generations of Kids were so smart that they made their earlier cousins look a little slow by comparison. They started to unpick the edges of some of the fundamental questions about the Universe, developed new, clean power sources. To my continual regret, artificial gravity was not among their inventions.
To be honest, living among very very bright people could be a total pain in the arse. Leaving aside the ego-niggling certainty that I could visit any hab, throw a rock, and be virtually guaranteed to hit someone whose IQ was some frightful multiple of mine, the bastards wouldn’t stop arguing.
In any other society you could go to one of your friends and say, “Hallo, mate, do you fancy going to (location y) and doing (activity z)?” and the chances are the answer you’d get would either be, “Sure, that sounds like fun,” or “Sorry, sunshine, I’m busy/low on cash/can’t be bothered.”
Here, the answer was more likely to be, “But we can’t do (activity z) because (result w or x) might occur.”
To which—and I’d heard more of these conversations, down the years, than I cared to remember—the response would be, “No, (result w) cannot occur until (conditions j and m) have been fulfilled.”
And you’d hear, “(Condition m) cannot be fulfilled until (event t) has occurred.”
And on and on and on.
It wasn’t that the Kids were bad people, especially. They were just hardwired to see all the angles of a situation, all at once, in nitpicking detail. Some of the early generations had been shy, borderline Asperger-ish, but most of the more recent ones were fully socialised and you could have a normal conversation with them, even though you knew that, in their heads, they were simultaneously analysing all the possible outcomes. It could be a bit spooky, if you let it get to you.
When the Writers, bless them, saw these character traits emerging in their children, they realised that the Colony was in trouble. The stolen colonists who had chosen to remain were enthusiastically embracing all forms of rewriting and leaping off beyond human norms. Half the time, the Kids couldn’t decide what to do because they were too busy thinking through all the possibilities. They needed mundanes.
After giving me a tour of the Big Hab and introducing me to a couple of the Kids—who just giggled at me and talked to each other in a language they’d made up—Connie’s pitch was simple. The Colony was, by any stretch of the imagination, a success, but from time to time it needed new blood, new talent, new perspectives. There was a danger of it becoming static, stagnant. So occasionally talent-spotters were sent out to do a tour of the Settled Worlds looking for likely recruits. In the middle of one such tour, Connie had caught up with my resignation press release and something about it had appealed to her sense of humour.
Join us, she told me. All the Writers want is to be left alone to do their thing—their thing which, incidentally, has cured cancer and hundreds of diseases and extended the human lifespan by several times. When they’re ready they’ll got back to the Settled Worlds and hand over their miracles and everyone will see that what they did was necessary for the good of the Human Race. But until then, they need to work uninterrupted.
“And if I say no?”
She shook her head. “The Writers have developed a technique that erases specific memories. It’s completely foolproof. We’ll just wipe everything that happened since you sat down in that restaurant on the Rest, put you into suspension, and drop you off on one of the Settled Worlds. No one will be any the wiser.”
I must have looked unconvinced because she went on cheerfully, “Come on, Duke. What have you got to go back to? Celebrity’s got a short half-life. Nobody will ever employ you again after the noise you made leaving the Bureau, and your savings won’t last forever. You’re just going to drift until you can’t afford to drift any more, and then what’ll you do?”
Why did I say yes? Initially it was because I had a shrewd idea that the Writers’ infallible magic memory-wiping technique was accomplished with a .45 Magnum pistol round, but beyond that I had a sinking feeling that she was right, and I had known it for a while. I’d burned rather more bridges than was strictly good for me, and while it had made perfect sense at the time, in the cold light of day it looked more and more like the stupidest thing I had ever done. Whistleblowers look great in the media, but be honest, would you trust one with your company’s secrets?
I shrugged. “I’ll give it a try.”
That was more than a century ago.
* * *
I once read somewhere that only half a dozen people have the vaguest idea how hyperdrive works. That article was wrong. The figure was actually in the low fifties, and most of them lived in the Colony.
The Colony’s hyperdrive research was even more closely guarded than its other secrets. With the single exception of the time Connie had kidnapped me from Angel’s Rest, the Colony’s upgraded ships never made contact with other inhabited systems or outsider vessels; if we did visit elsewhere—posing as outsystem traders or whatever—we used one of the Colony’s fleet of ships powered by old-fashioned motors.
We did this for reasons of self-preservation. I—and I suspect everyone apart from those fifty-odd people—viewed hyperdrive as a bit of a magic trick, a sleight of hand using incomprehensible physics. There was an element of time-dilation to hyperdrive, which may have had something to do with causality or may have had something to do with quantum reality, I had no idea. Say you had a hyperdrive motor that could move a ship a light-year in a month; when you popped out at your destination, you’d find that a year had passed in the outside universe. All of this varied depending on how efficient your motors were, according to some bizarre and counterintuitive mathematical function that someone had once shown me but I was unable to comprehend. Long story short, the more efficient your motors, the faster you got from one place to the next, and the smaller the time dilation.
As soon as the second generation of Kids were old enough, the Writers had let them loose on the hyperdrive, as a kind of graduation exercise, and the Kids had rewarded them with virtually dilationless motors that would operate within a gravity well—ships that could cross a light-year of space in a week in real time and drop out in orbit of a planet.
It went without saying that no one else had hyperdrive motors that efficient. If, by some freak accident, one of our ships had fallen into the hands of the Bureau, it woul
d have been like putting up a big sign saying GENIUSES ARE AT WORK SOMEWHERE—WATCH OUT. Which was not the point of the Colony.
Anyway, in their wanderings through the wilder meadows of physics, the Kids discovered that if you applied a certain stress to local space it would snuff out an operating hyperdrive motor like someone blowing out a candle. They called it the Punch, and a couple of hundred years later the Writers had built this capability into one of the upgrades of the dewline, which by then was a colossal globe of satellites orbiting the system at the limits of the cometary halo.
The dewline had started out as a couple of hundred distant early warning stations scattered through local space around the Colony, but they were unreliable and a pain in the arse to keep visiting for maintenance. So the Writers had put the problem to the Kids, who came up with an autonomous self-repairing satellite about the size of a sedan chair. Research and development had brought that down to a thing a little larger than a tangerine, capable of repairing and even reproducing itself. We raided the asteroid belts of nearby uninhabited systems for raw materials and just let the little satellites go at it, and we now had a cloud of millions of them, very nearly Von Neumann machines, or as close as anyone dared let them be, at any rate. Working collectively, they could lase and mase in frightful amounts. They constantly monitored the system as far out as Newark, the pathetic little brown dwarf six light-years distant that was our nearest neighbour. They could warp space in a way that did unspeakable things to the quantum state of a hyperdrive motor, the idea being that any intruder who popped into the system wouldn’t be able to pop out again.
Of course, all this was predicated on the dewline actually working, and its failure to spot the probe’s entry into the system called this into question. I needed to know if it was faulty, and if so, how. Short of a colossal coincidence—somebody actually running into an intruder, the way Ernie had—there was no other way of spotting incursions. I wanted to run a test of the active defences—fire laser and maser bursts, run the Punch—but I didn’t dare in case someone was watching the system.
“You’d just wind up frying a bunch of people’s drives,” Shaker said. “You know what it’s like—you can coordinate all you want and there’ll still be someone who won’t turn off his motors during the test.”
“That’s because everyone here is so fucking smart,” I muttered sourly.
He looked at me. “You look awful.”
“Cheers.” I raised my glass in salute, took a drink.
Shaker was as mundane as I was. He looked baseline human, but he’d been tweaked and rewritten in ways that were not immediately obvious, none of which had prevented him being endearingly scruffy. What he was not was superbright. He was a good tech, though. It was a pity he hadn’t come up with any faults in the dewline yet.
“Has anyone,” he ventured gently, “suggested that you might be getting the teeniest little bit obsessed with the dewline?”
“I’ll add your name to the list.”
He sighed and looked around the bar, probably scoping it out in case Connie came in again and rousted him. He took a little matte-black sphere from his pocket and pressed it to the stickpad on the bar top. “We’re performing physical sampling now,” he said.
I plucked the sphere from the pad and held it up in front of my eyes. It was featureless save for a dozen or so tiny quad nozzles. I had no idea how these things worked; it was like a chimpanzee trying to understand nuclear fusion. I stuck the little satellite to the bar again and said, “This is ridiculous.”
Give him credit, he didn’t say “I told you so.”
“We’ll keep sampling as long as we can; maybe something will turn up. But don’t hold your breath.”
“Will the defences work?” I asked wearily. “If we need to whack someone?”
“I keep telling you, Duke,” he said. “Everything works, as far as we can tell. It’s not a fault in the dewline; that probe had some kind of stealth capability.”
“Well, we’re fucked, then. There could be hundreds of the fucking things in the system right now. They could have been here for years.”
“Dude,” Shaker said solemnly, “we are leaving anyway.”
I looked at him, a number of replies going through my mind, none of them terribly polite, but in the end I could only muster the energy to say, “Yes. Yes, we’re leaving anyway.”
* * *
We still hadn’t finished running diagnostic tests when Potter decided to pull the resources she’d let me requisition. The Colony had been preparing to hightail it for almost eight months and it still wasn’t ready; all the really valuable stuff—the Kids, the research and so on—had been loaded onto the Writers’ ship, and they were ready to go at a moment’s notice. The population of about two-thirds of the habs was also on board; it was a bit crowded and the biosphere was going to take some knocks, but everyone would survive.
Which left the other third of the population cleaning up the system. There was no point deflating the habs and carting them to the Rendezvous Point; we emptied them of everything useful and deorbited them into the sun. It was going to be easier just to fab up new ones at the other end, although it would take years to replace the kudzu. Some of the bigger buildings had their own life support systems and hyperdrive motors; those we towed out through huge slashes in the sides of the habs and prepped for flight.
“This is a bloody circus,” Connie complained at one of our weekly crisis meetings. “Nobody’s going anywhere; we might as well just turn ourselves in and get it over with.”
I yawned and rubbed my eyes. The Writers had given me quite a few little tweaks down the years, but it had been a while since I’d had more than a couple of hours’ sleep, and I was only human, mostly. I said, “I vote we give the Writers a Go.”
“That’s not up to us,” said Karl. “Potter’ll decide when she goes, nobody else.”
“Makes sense to get them off-site, though,” put in Ernie, who I had drafted onto the team as a punishment for starting the whole fucking mess in the first place.
I leaned forward and rested my head on the bar. With the Big Hab now evacuated and City Hall crewed up and ready to leave, Radetzsky’s was one of the few habs left where we could work, and even that was mostly empty and powered-down and rather spooky. We had invaded the Penultimate and set up our comms and other gear in the deserted bar. I was going to miss the place.
“Duke?” said Connie.
“Sorry.” I sat up. “What?”
She looked at me. “You should get some shut-eye.”
I shook my head. “No time. Sleep when I’m dead.” I blinked. “Okay. We let Potter decide. So. What next?”
“We’re at ninety percent,” said Shaker, meaning the interminable crawl of the dewline diagnostic. “Still no significant deterioration.”
“Jesus,” I muttered. “It’ll be the last thing you look at; it’s always the last thing you look at.”
Everyone looked at me. I’d assembled the Crisis Team early on in my term as President, on the grounds that I would probably never need them but if I did, I would be too busy to put them together later. I’d sat down one evening—here in the Penultimate Bar, as it happened—with a tablet and a copy of a database the Writers had given me, and tried, Kid-like, to think about every possible disaster that could befall the Colony and which skills I would need to help me deal with them. It would have made more sense, on the face of it, to just ask a couple of the Kids to do it for me, but they would just have spent the whole time arguing and I’d still have been waiting for an answer when disaster overtook us.
I wound up with ten names, to which I added Connie’s and my own for my personal Dirty Dozen. Ernie brought us up to thirteen, and we gathered in the Penultimate at least once a week and basically just bitched about the whole sorry business for a few hours until we felt sufficiently rested to go back out and start all over again. This may not have been the most efficient way to do things, but I was a lawyer, not a manager, and it wasn’t my fault that t
his situation had happened during my Presidency.
Karl was my Vice President, a post he used mostly to get free meals in restaurants. He and I were the most mundane people I knew in the Colony. Shaker was there because he worked on the dewline. Karen von Pahlen and Ernie were upsystem miners. Bo Grant was an infrastructure specialist we’d recruited from a Bureau colony on one of the worlds of Epsilon Eridani. Reece Callaghan took care of our long-range planning. And so on. I’d spent some time casting about for the most socialised Kid I could find, on the grounds that we probably wouldn’t get very far without at least one superbright, and wound up with the Twins, Turold and Telifer, who were impossible to tell apart and were basically one personality in two bodies. This could be spooky at times, but I’d learned to live with it. I’d asked Potter if one of the Writers would volunteer for the Crisis Team, but none of them could be bothered and in the end I’d dropped the subject.
Everyone was still looking at me. They all looked exhausted, and I belatedly realised that they were all waiting for me to tell them to go and get some sleep.
“Okay,” I said. “Time out. Go away, get some food, get some sleep, get a shower. Back here in eight hours.”
Everyone else left, but Connie stayed behind, sitting at one of the tables watching me as I scrolled through lists of stuff on my tablet. “So,” I said. “Points?”
“You’re doing fine, Duke,” she told me. “You could maybe learn to delegate a bit more.”
“Delegate? I’m practically running this thing from a Jacuzzi as it is.”
She chuckled. “You put together a good team.”
“More by luck than judgement.”
“You put together a good team,” she insisted gently. “They know what they have to do, and they’re good at it. It’s just the . . . the scale of the thing.”
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