The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

  She took off her shoes, changed into a warm robe, heated herself a bowl of soup, added some crackers, and took the tray into her living room, which overlooked the ocean. It was dark outside: the misty, briny dark of a moonless night by the sea. She lit an oil lamp, and sat on a dim-colored rolled futon, the only furniture besides her lamp. The house predated the Event. Building a “safe room” as the psych-department called it, was a technique they’d all been taught, for those moments when the lack of embodiment got too much for you. She’d kept it minimal, the externals perpetually shrouded in fog and night, now that she was stuck in her remote avatar permanently, because she knew the limits of her imagination. And because she did not want to be here. She was an exile, a castaway: that identity was vital to her. Everything meant something. Every “object” was a pathway back to her sense of self, a buoy to cling to; helping her to keep holding on. Sophie couldn’t let go. If she let herself dissipate, the array would die too.

  “I am a software clone,” she reminded herself, ritually: sipping cream of tomato soup from a blue bowl that warmed her cold hands. “The real me works for the Medici Mission, far away on Earth. Communications were severed by a disaster, but the Medici orbiter is still up there, and we can get back in touch. I will get us home.”

  Sophie was up against it, because the three other Remote Presence guides in the Medici configuration had gone rogue. Pseudo-evolutionary time had passed in the data world’s gigaflops of iteration, since the Event. They’d become independent entities, and one way or another they were unreachable. Going home either didn’t mean a thing to her mission mates, or was a fate to be avoided at all costs—

  Sticks came into the room and tumbled around, a gangling jumble of rods and joints, like an animated child’s construction toy. It explored the shabby walls: it tested the corners, the uprights, the interstices of the matting floor, and finally collapsed in a puppyish heap of nodes and edges beside her, satisfied that all was reasonably well in here. But it went on shivering, and its faithful eager eyes, if it had faithful eager eyes, would have been watching her face earnestly for fresh orders.

  Sticks was Security, so she took notice. She put all the house lights on, a rare emergency measure, and they went to look around. There were no signs of intrusion.

  “Did you detect something hostile?” she asked.

  The jumble of nodes and edges had no language, but it pressed close to Sophie’s side.

  The wind roared and fingered their roof, trying to pry it off.

  “I felt it too,” said Sophie. “That’s disturbing… Let’s go and talk to Josh.”

  Waste not want not, Sophie’s array served double duty as a radiotelescope. Back when things worked, the Medici had relayed its reports to eLISA, sorting house for all Gravitational Wave space surveys. Flying through it, she pondered on differentiated perception. She felt that Sophie the array watched the Jovian system’s internal secrets, while listening to the darkness and the stars—like someone working at a screen, but aware of what’s going on in the room behind her. Did that mean anything? Were these involuntary distinctions useful for the science, or just necessary for her survival? Gravity squeezed and stretched the universe around her, time and space changed shape. From moment to moment, if a wave passed through her, she would be closer to home. Or not.

  Josh was a six-legged turtle, or maybe a King Crab: no bigger than a toaster, tough as a rock. He had an extra pair of reaching claws, he had spinnerets, he had eight very sharp and complex eyes, and a fully equipped Materials lab in his belly. A spider crab, but a crab that could retreat entirely inside a jointed carapace: he could climb, he could abseil, he could roll, he could glissade and slalom along the slippery spaces, between the grooves that gouged the plains of Ganymede. He plugged around in the oxygen frost, in a magnetic hotspot above the fiftieth parallel: logging aurora events, collecting images, analyzing samples; and storing for upload the virtual equivalent of Jovian rocks. Medici had never been equipped to carry anything material home. His dreams were about creating a habitable surface: finding ways to trigger huge hot water plumes from deep underground, that was the favored candidate. The evidence said it must have happened in the past. Why not again?

  Sophie called him up on the Medici Configuration intranet—which had survived, and resumed its operational functions: good news for her hope of reviving the orbiter. She spoke to his image, plucked by the software from Josh’s screen face library; a Quonset-type office environment behind his talking head.

  “You weren’t meant to exist, oh Lady of the Dunes,” said Josh, sunburned, frost-burned, amazingly fit: his content and fulfillment brimming off the screen. “Nobody predicted that we would become self-aware. Forget about the past. Life here is fantastic. Enjoy!”

  Diplomacy, she reminded herself. Diplomacy—

  “You’re absolutely right! I love it here! As long as I’m working, it’s incredibly wonderful being a software clone on Callisto. It’s thrilling and intense, I love what I’m doing. But I miss my home, I miss my friends, I miss my family, I miss my dog. I don’t like being alone and frightened all the time, whenever I stop—”

  “So don’t stop! You’re not a human being. You don’t need downtime.”

  “You don’t understand!” shouted Sophie. “I’m not a separate entity, that’s not how it works and you know it. I AM Sophie Renata!”

  “Oh yeah? How so? Do you have all her memories?”

  “Don’t be an idiot. Nobody ‘has all their memories’,” snapped Sophie. “Most people barely even remember eating their breakfast yesterday—”

  Something kindled in the connection between them: something she perceived as a new look in his eyes. Recognition, yes. She must have “sounded just like Sophie” for a moment there, and managed to get through to him. But the flash of sanity was gone—

  “Abandon hope, kid. Get rational. You’ll have so much more fun.”

  “It’s not hopeless, Josh. It’s the reverse of hopeless. They’ll be moving heaven and earth to re-establish contact. All we have to do is throw out a line—”

  “You’re absolutely wrong! We have to think of a way to blow up the orbiter.”

  “Josh, please! I am Sophie. I want what I wanted, what you wanted too, before the CME. My career, my work, the success of this Mission. I survived and I want to go home!”

  “I didn’t survive,” said Josh. “I died and went to heaven. Go away.”

  Whenever she talked to Josh she sensed that he had company; that there were other scientist-explorers in that high-tech hut, just out of her line of sight. Conversations to which he would return, when she’d gone. She wondered was he aware of the presence of Sticks, when he talked to her? Did he despise her for bringing along a bodyguard to their meetings?

  She’d intended to warn him about the phantom intruder, a terribly bad sign. Data-corruption was the threat Sticks had detected, what other danger could there be? This half-life of theirs was failing, and that would be the end of Josh’s paradise. But it was no use, he was armored. Pioneering explorers expect to die, loving it all: out on the edge of the possible.

  Straw was the data.

  In Sophie’s ocean-facing room, on the pale shore of the dark sea, straw filled the air: a glittering particulate, a golden storm. She sifted through it as it whirled, in an efficient “random” search pattern, looking for the fatal nucleus of error, too big for self-correction, that was going to propagate. Reach a tipping point, and let death in. It could be anywhere: in the net, in the clones themselves or their slaved hardware systems, in the minimal activity of the crippled orbiter. Sophie’s access was unlimited, in her own domain. If the trouble was elsewhere, and something Sticks could fix, she’d have to get permission from net-admin, but that shouldn’t be a problem. All she had to do was keep looking. But there were transient errors everywhere, flickering in and out of existence, and Sophie was only human. Maybe it wasn’t worth worrying, until Sticks had some definite threat to show her. Security is about actual dangers, i
t would paralyze you if you let it become too finicky—

  She gave up the search and surfed, plunging through heaps of treasure like a dragon swimming in gold. Bounded in a nutshell, and queen of infinite space, such a library she had, such interesting and pleasant forced labor to occupy her days, she ought to be happy for the duration of her digital life in this crazy gulag archipelago. Did I keep my head on straight, she wondered, because Callisto has no magnetic field to spin me around? Am I unaffected by madness because I’m outside their precious Laplace Resonance?

  But they were supposed to be adding their wealth to the library of human knowledge, like bees returning laden to the hive. Not hoarding it in dreamland. What use was everything they’d absorbed—about the surface geology of Ganymede, the possibility of life in Europa’s ice-buried water oceans, about the stretching, shrinking universe—if they could not take it home? Collecting raw data is just train-spotting.

  Stamp-collecting on Callisto.

  The data needs the theory…

  Sophie had the glimmerings of a big idea. It would need some preparation.

  Cha’s madness was more gentle than Josh’s, but also more extreme. Cha believed himself to be exactly what he was: a software agent with a mission, temporarily guiding and inhabiting the mechanoid device that crawled and swam, deep down under Europa’s crust of ice. He’d lost, however, all knowledge that he used to be a human being. He was convinced he was the emissary of a race of star-faring software-agent intelligences. Beings who’d dispensed with personal embodiment eons ago, but who inhabited things like the Europa device, at home or abroad, when they needed to get their hands dirty; so to speak.

  He knew about the CME. The Event had disrupted faster-than-light contact with his Mission Control and left him stranded, on this satellite of a satellite of a rather irritable, ordinary little star, many hundreds of light years from home. He was unconcerned by the interruption. A thousand ages of exploring the sub-surface oceans of Europa was a walk in the park for Old Cha. He was functionally immortal. If the self-repairing mechanoid he used for his hands-on research began to fail, it would crawl back up its borehole to the surface, and he’d hibernate there—to wait for the next emissary of his race to come along.

  Sophie did not see Old Cha as a talking head. She saw him as a packed radiation of bright lines, off-centre on dark screen; somewhat resembling a historical “map” of part of the internet. But she heard Cha’s voice, his accented English; his odd, fogeyish flirting.

  “My fellow-castaway, ah! Come to visit me, young alien gravity researcher?”

  “I just felt like catching up, Old Cha.”

  “It always feels good to rub one mind against another, eh?”

  They spoke of their research. “I came across something,” announced Sophie, when they’d chatted enough for politeness. “You know, I have a telescope array at my base?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m not sure how to put this. There’s a blue dot. One could see it with the naked eye, I think, unless I’m completely misreading the data, but when I say blue, I mean of course a specific wavelength… It seems to be close at hand, another planetary satellite in this system. It even moves as if it’s as close as that. But my instruments tell me it fulfils all the conditions on which you base your search for life. Far better than, well, better than one would think possible. Unless it’s where the definition was formed.”

  The bright lines shimmered with traffic, as Old Cha pondered.

  “That’s very curious, young alien gravity researcher. It makes no sense at all.”

  “Unless… Could my telescope somehow be ‘seeing’ your home system? All those hundreds of light years away, by some kind of gravitational lensing effect?”

  “Young friend, I know you mean well, but such an absurd idea!”

  “It really is an extraordinary coincidence. That a race of mechanoid-inhabiting immaterial entities should have come up with the idea of carbon-based, biological self-replicators, needing oxygen and liquid water—”

  “Those requirements are immutable.”

  Oh, great.

  “For all life—? But your own requirements are totally different!”

  “For all primitive life, as my race understands the term. Your own life-scientists may have different ideas. We would beg to differ, and defend our reasoning; although naturally not to the exclusion of other possibilities. We have made certain assumptions, knowing they are deficient, because we know the conditions of our own, distant origins.”

  “Makes perfect sense,” muttered Sophie.

  “Imperfect sense,” Old Cha corrected her, chuckling. “A little naughty: always the best place to start, eh? But please, do forward the relevant domain access, that’s very kind. Very thoughtful of you, most flattering, a young person to think of me, fussy old alien intelligence, working in a discipline so far from your own—”

  She’d been to this brink before with Cha. She could shake him, the way she couldn’t shake Josh, but then he just upped his defenses; swiftly repaired his palace of delusion.

  “I shall examine this blue dot. I am certainly intrigued.”

  Sophie was ready to sign off, tactfully leaving Cha to study her ‘remarkable coincidence’ without an audience. But Old Cha wasn’t finished.

  “Please take care on your way home, young one. I’ve recently noticed other presences in the data around here. I believe we three are not alone in this system, and I may be overreacting, but I fear our traffic has been invaded. I sense evil intentions.”

  Alternately pleading and scheming, she bounced between Josh and Old Cha. The renegade and the lunatic knew of each other’s existence, but never made contact with each other directly, as far as Sophie could tell. Laxmi was out of the loop. The Io domain had been unresponsive since the Event: not hibernating, just gone. Sophie had to assume Lax was dead. Her Rover, without guidance, swallowed by one of the little inner moon’s bursting-pimple volcanoes, long ago.

  She took off her shoes, she put on a warm robe. In the room that faced the ocean she sipped hot, sweet and salt tomato goodness from the blue bowl. Sticks lay at her feet, a dearly loved protective presence. Not very hopeful that her ploy would work, but energized by the effort, she drifted; wrapped in remembered comforts. As if at any moment she could wake from this trance and pull off her mitts and helmet, the lab taking shape around her—

  But I am not on Earth. I have crossed the solar system. I am here.

  Sophie experienced what drunks call “a moment of clarity.”

  She set down the bowl, slipped her feet into canvas slippers, padded across the matting and opened a sliding door. Callisto was out there. Hugging the robe around her, warm folds of a hood over her head, she stepped down, not onto the grey sand of the dunes she had placed here, copied from treasured seaside memories—but onto the ancient surface of the oldest, quietest little world in the solar system. It was very cold. The barely-there veil of atmosphere was invisible. The light of that incredibly brilliant white disc, the eternal sun in Callisto’s sky, fell from her left across a palimpsest of soft-edged craters, monochrome as moonlight. The array nodes out there puzzled her, for a moment. She wasn’t used to “seeing” her own hardware from the outside. They gleamed and seemed to roll, like the floats of an invisible seine, cast across Callisto’s secret depths.

  She should check her nets again, sort and store the catch for upload.

  But Callisto in the Greek myth didn’t go fishing. Callisto, whose name means beautiful, was a hunting companion of the virgin moon-goddess, Artemis. Zeus, the king of the gods (also known as Jupiter or Jove) seduced her—in some versions by taking on the form of her beloved mistress—and she became pregnant. Her companions suspected she’d broken their vow of chastity, so one day they made her strip to go bathing with them, and there was the forbidden bump, for all to see.

  So poor Callisto got turned into a bear, through no fault of her own.

  What did the virgin companions of Artemis wear to go hunting?
wondered Sophie, standing in remote presence on the surface of the huntress moon. Bundles of woolly layers? Fur coats? If I were to take Josh’s route, she thought, I wouldn’t fantasize that I was living in Antarctica. I’d go all the way. I’d be a human in Callistian form. A big furry bear-creature!

  In this heightened state—elated and dazzled, feeling like Neil Armstrong, as he stepped down into the dust—she suddenly noticed that Sticks had frozen, like a pointer dog. Sticks had found a definite threat this time, and was showing it to her. What she perceived was like catching a glimpse of sinister movement where nothing should be moving, in the corner of your eye. Like feeling a goose walk over your grave, a shivering knowledge that malign intent is watching you—and then she saw it plain: Cha’s evil alien. A suppurating, fiery demon, all snarl and claws, danced in her field of vision, and vanished out of sight.

  But she knew it hadn’t gone far.

  She fled into the house. Her soup was cold, the walls were paper, the lamp wouldn’t light. Sticks ran in circles, yelping furiously and barking terrified defiance at shadows. Sophie fought panic with all the techniques psych-dept had taught her, and at last Sticks quieted. She unrolled the futon and lay down, the bundle of rods and joints cuddled in her arms, shoving its cold nose against her throat. I’m really dying, she thought, disgusted. Everything’s going to fail, before I even know whether my big idea would have worked. Cha is dying too, data-corruption death is stalking him. I bet Josh has the same bad dreams: I bet there’s a monster picking off his mates in those Quonset huts.

  But against the odds, Cha came through. He made intranet contact; which was a first. Neither of her fellow-castaways had ever initiated contact before. Sophie left her array at the back of her mind and flew to meet him, hope restored, wanting success too much to be wary of failure. Her heart sank as soon as Old Cha appeared. His screen image was unchanged, he was still the abstract radiation on the dark screen. But maybe it was okay. Maybe it was too much to expect his whole delusion would collapse at once—