Shine

by Jetse de Vries

  And every time, they had asked for a little more. Lower costs. Less total fuel used. Lower compensation for his nonessential personnel. Lower compensation for himself, even though he was in the bottom 10% of the CEO echelon. Each time, he had given them almost everything they’d asked.

  Everything except changing his schedule of launches or the circumlunar trajectory. Even though they’d put an end to all deep space exploration after the successful Europa lander and its bizarre signals, they still maintained instrumentation at Lagrange points; he argued that it would be too costly to reengineer his fleet to service only the Lagrange instrumentation; they suspected he was eavesdropping on the Europan signals, hoping for another string of primes or some other indication of intelligence.

  But they let him be, and he kept giving them what they wanted. For the moment, the equation was in balance.

  Roy spent the next hour in his office fully immersed in virtuality, interviewing new potential citizens of Hermes.

  Their software found fewer and fewer candidates these days, as people with multiple talents and high drive were snapped up early in their careers by Unified Sustainability or one of the other transnationals. Many more had skeins. Roy wanted nothing to do with skeins. There was no telling how smart a skein was.

  And then there were the genetically compromised. People outside the transnational-sponsored inoc-ulations were known to sometimes have long bouts with the flu and come out of it thinking, well, a little differently. Being more content with their lives. Or maybe just unable to reproduce. Rewriting some of the old aggression responses, genetic sterilization—they were old tricks, but they worked.

  And he knew what the transnationals would say. It is necessary. We had to do it. Too many people. Too few resources. Look at the population curve. We’re blunting it. We’re ensuring a future for mankind.

  And the needle keeps skipping at the end of the record, he thought.

  On a whim, Roy called Jasyn Torres, his head of household staff. His house was automated and intelligent and as biomimetic as possible. It didn’t need a staff. But two years ago, US had made him take one household staff member per 100 square meters of floorspace. He usually let them fish the reefs; that seemed to be what they wanted to do.

  Jasyn came into the office. His face was slack, free of affect.

  “Do you know what a record is?”

  Jaysn looked at him blankly for a moment, then smiled. “A record is an entry in a database,” he said. “Or, considering your age, you may be referring to an analog music storage medium.”

  “Did you just read that off the net?”

  “Standard ambient context-based search,” Jasyn said.

  “Can you talk to me like a person?”

  “I am speaking to you like a person.”

  “No. Not with everything filtered and mediated. Can’t you just talk to me, one on one, without everything going through your skein?”

  “No,” Jasyn said.

  “Can you—be you?”

  Jasyn’s expression went blank for a moment. Roy envisioned data flowing through the nanonetwork grown into his head, bouncing to the mainland and back, carrying many answers.

  “Yes,” Jasyn said. “Most definitely.”

  “Aren’t you sad?”

  “No, not at all. We’re living in the best times of the human race. We have reached post-scarcity. There is plenty for all.”

  “But we aren’t moving forward!”

  “Post-scarcity is stability,” Jasyn said.

  “But this isn’t post-scarcity.”

  “Enough for all is post-scarcity.” Smiling.

  Roy forced himself to mimic Jasyn’s smile. “Thanks. You can go.”

  Jasyn nodded and left. Roy sat at his desk and stared out into his large, brilliant house, seeing nothing. Beware the best of intentions. Especially when they make too much sense.

  “Skip, skip,” he said softly.

  THE PEACE PIPEentered orbit around the Earth quietly and without drama, and began reporting its progress to the moon. It was a smart piece of equipment by Hermes’ standards, smart enough to try to communicate with any network it could find. Despite its sophistication, many of the communications protocols were beyond its capabilities, impenetrable and alien. Most never even acknowledged the Peace Pipe’s overtures. Some rejected it outright.

  But a few did. And a few of those said, Talk to us.

  The Peace Pipe told them of Hermes and its thirteen hundred inhabitants. It sent pictures of the children. It offered a single bottle of lunar wine, if the people of Earth would come to orbit to collect it. It promised peace.

  The protocols listened intently, acknowledging every packet.

  “Someone is hearing us!” said the kids. The adults, including Ani, shook their heads. Acknowledging wasn’t hearing. And even hearing wasn’t understanding.

  But when Jared went to stand in front of the stream and rail at them, Ani said, “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s their time. Don’t discourage them.”

  “They don’t understand! They think everything can be fixed with more work.”

  “What else has ever fixed anything?” she said, softly. In the last week, the teens had stepped up. They’d worked extra shifts in the farm. They’d gone to Jared’s labs to help. They’d hit the old problems lists with a new eye, and they’d suggested a lot of things they could do. Most of which probably wasn’t workable. But to discover that there was still enthusiasm—it was thrilling.

  Jared was silent for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was unusually quiet. “Why did you come here?” he asked her.

  Ani shrugged and looked away. “I don’t know.”

  She could feel his gaze, hot, on the back of her neck. You don’t throw your life away on an ‘I don’t know,’ that gaze said.

  “Why did you?” Ani asked.

  Jared laughed. “Anyone with half a brain knows that. Because I’m an asshole. I poke holes in things. Everyone hates me. Of course I’m here.”

  Ani sighed. “I don’t know,” she said, finally.

  “What do you mean, ‘I don’t know?’”

  “I mean, I don’t know. I didn’t have a terrible childhood or get raped by my boyfriend or screwed out of an inheritance, or any of those easy answers. I just—I’ve just always wanted to do something just, well, incredibly crazy.”

  “You could’ve picked skydiving.”

  Ani shook her head. “I always wanted to make something, something important.”

  “I can’t believe it’s that simple.”

  “Why not?” she turned back to him. “Why can’t there just be something in our genes that makes us want to see what’s over the next ridge? Why does it always have to be some trauma? My dad, he did genetic research on plants. Corn. He never believed me either. Said, ‘Genes aren’t programs.’ But if it isn’t that, what?”

  “What are your specialties?”

  “Chemical engineering, functional physics, and American literature.”

  Jared nodded and said nothing.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Just how amazing we all are.”

  Ani shook her head. “I don’t think we’re amazing. I think we’re what we have to be. And I think our children will be what they have to be. Which will probably be a lot more than we are.”

  The next morning, they lost the link with the Peace Pipe. There had been no indication of a malfunction. It was just suddenly not there.

  She imagined a tiny flash, blooming over Earth.

  And wondered what the kids would do.

  UNIFIED SUSTAINABILITY CAME to get Roy Parekh in the same way it always did. Two men, one small and soundless boat. Except this time it wasn’t business suits and briefcases. They walked into his office holding small, silver guns. In his retinal displays, the two men had no names, no tags.

  “Is it that time?” he asked.

  The two men blinked and paused. One of them said, “Your statement suggests a
certain level of awareness of your crimes. Do you wish to state them?”

  “Will it assist in my trial?”

  “There will be no trial.”

  “Then why would I want to talk to you?”

  A pause. Then: “Unified Sustainability hereby seizes all assets and operations of Intelligent Risk. Roy Parekh, you are charged with crimes against humanity, specifically, the redirection of an unspecified but significant amount of engineered resources for the purpose of constructing an extraterrestrial base of operations.”

  And that was it. Some algorithm had coughed up red, or Nari and Thom and the rest had just had a bad day, or some Anonymi were shouting about the moon again. Whatever the trigger was, it was over. It was done.

  In Roy’s retinal screens, he saw SOLR wake up. His software, his Solution of Last Resort. He blinked an okay-to-deploy, and watched as Intelligent Risk’s dashboard began blinking red.

  The two men jumped. “What are you doing?” one cried.

  Roy smiled. SOLR wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t a worm or a virus. It was just a good old-fashioned trigger, wired into good old-fashioned explosives in his most sensitive datacenters. And in his launch facilities in New Mexico and Ecuador. And into his launch vehicles. He imagined the explosions and the flames.

  There was a sharp thunderclap and Roy was thrown backwards. He flew over his desk, marveling for an instant at the reproduction Wright chandelier. He landed on his back and looked down at a large bloody hole in his chest. He laughed and saw bubbles popping in his own blood, like lava. He felt nothing.

  I’m sorry I can’t say goodbye, he thought, thinking of all the people on the moon.

  Faces flickered in front of him. So many determined people. They would not fail.

  “Hello, iPod,” he said, and died.

  ANI LOERA DIDN’T believe what she was seeing on the streams, so she went down to the chamber that housed the Europan Explorer and its half-built twin, Jove’s Dream. The chamber was never meant to be pressurized, so she slammed through putting on her surface suit as quickly as possible.

  When she stepped into the chamber, her breath caught.

  Standing in ranks in front of the Europan Explorer were over a hundred spacesuit-clad figures. Their names scrolled on her wriststream. Almost all of them were eighteen or under.

  Which meant they made the spacesuits themselves, she thought. Making suits for kids still growing was an amazing extravagance—not unknown, but not usual.

  They made the suits themselves.

  Ani could see no faces behind the silver visors, but names were sewn neatly onto their chests. She walked up to one of the tallest, whose name was James Kinoshita. Dr. Kinoshita’s son.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, over the suit comm.

  “We’re volunteering,” James said. “If you think the Europan Explorer mission is too risky, we’ll take it.”

  A muted chorus grew on the comms. “Yeah.” “It’s our future.” “We’ll take the risk.”

  For a moment, two emotions fought in Ani’s chest: an almost ecstatic sense of pride, coupled with a deep, sharp fear. These kids would do whatever it takes! These kids would die trying!

  “You’ve heard Jared—uh, Dr. Gildea’s analysis,” Ani said. “He doesn’t think we can get a workable economy without biomimetic tech and thinkers to optimize it.”

  “We’ve run the same simulations!” one of the kids said. “It’s not impossible. Human oversight can replace the thinkers. And human labor can replace the bio-m. Bio-m is slow. We could build a workable machine economy in a hundredth the time.”

  “Even if it’s cast-iron huts and 1980’s-level integrated circuits,” James said. “We’re ready for it.”

  “You’re ready to camp on an asteroid?”

  “We did it before. Apollo.”

  Ani grimaced. Apollo was luck. Flying to the moon with near vacuum-tube technology.

  “You’re ready to die?” she asked.

  Silence for a moment. Then. “There’s nowhere else for us.” A girl’s voice, soft and low.

  Ani nodded. Thinking of Earth. Thinking of them snuffing out their little Peace Pipe.

  And in that moment, she could feel all of the eyes on her. All of the eyes of all of the people on the moon. Watching and waiting for her response.

  “No,” she said. “You’re not going.”

  A nervous shuffle. “You’re... not letting us?” James asked.

  “Not by yourselves,” she said. And smiled.

  ROY PAREKH WOKE in a little room with gray-painted walls and sterile stainless steel furniture. He could not feel his body. His vision faded in and out of focus. He tried to move. He might as well have been made of wood.

  I died, he thought.

  And they brought you back, came a voice. A familiar voice. Thom.

  Roy Parekh tried to open his mouth to speak, but nothing moved.

  Don’t try. There’s not much of you left. Just think.

  What’s happening?

  They need some facts. You caught them a bit off guard. You like Last Resorts, don’t you?

  Wait. They?

  A feeling of frustration from Thom. Then: I came to give you this.

  There was a strange sensation. A woman’s voice, vaguely familiar, chattered in Roy’s head. It said things about the moon. Images came: children’s faces. Families, standing against gray steel bulkheads and mugging for the camera. Some kind of feast in a gaudily-painted bar. Kids clutching little stuffed animals. People in spacesuits.

  Roy felt his heart explode. He tried to cry. No tears came. This is what I made, he thought.

  Why didn’t you go with them? Thom asked.

  Because look what I did here, Roy thought. Because they deserved better than me. Because, at the very end of things, I am still a monster.

  You crazy bastard, Thom said. Behind his words was a sadness, a finality.

  Is Unified Sustainability going to work with them? Roy asked.

  What do you think?

  No.

  Your grasp of human nature is still solid. Thom seemed amused.

  What did they dredge out of me? Roy asked.

  What they needed.

  What?

  Goodbye, Roy.

  Tell me!

  Silence from Thom. Roy could still sense his presence, though.

  That’s enough, another voice came.

  Who are you?

  I am the combined voice of Unified Sustainability. I am the one who allowed the whim of your friend. The voice was precise and distant. Roy wondered if it was a thinker or a human being.

  What did you dig out of my mind?

  The location of Hermes. Also, enough information to repair and re-equip one of your damaged launch vehicles.

  But you aren’t going there to trade with them.

  No.

  And that was all.

  ON THE EVE of the launch of the Europa Explorer, Ani felt a single sharp shock and a deep rumble. Hermes creaked and groaned, and air leak alarms flared red all over.

  Overworked kids and adults alike scrambled to patch the hallways and chambers as the streams from the external cameras told the story: a bright light had flared to the south. In the near-vacuum of the Moon’s atmosphere, the classic mushroom cloud shape was flattened.

  “They nuked us,” she said, and immediately regretted it, because she was still Prime, and she was still on-stream, and people would take that, and replay it again and again, and laugh.

  “Yeah, looks like they hit the drop point,” Jun Shao said, over the public stream.

  “Should we be worried?” she asked.

  “It’s twenty klicks away. It’ll raise the background radiation on the surface a bit, but we’re fine.”

  “Why would they nuke the drop point?”

  “Remember the original plans,” Marie Middleton, the head of infrastructure, popped in. “They wanted the drop point right on top of Hermes. I told ’em we should move it.”

  “I told them to move i
t,” Jared cut in.

  “No, I did!”

  “I did!”

  Ani frowned, then laughed. If everyone wanted to be a hero, let them be heroes.

  Then she frowned again. “What happens if they send more bombs, just to be sure?”

  Jared cut into the stream. “News from Earth is that Unified Sustainability is in a skirmish right now with a half-dozen other transnationals. Maybe prompted by their launch. Maybe prompted by the Peace Pipe. I don’t want to do any two-way comms at all. Best we kill the link and stay silent, so they think we’re gone.”

  Murmured assent. The vote came back quickly, over 80% in favor of cutting the link.

  In time, the conversation finally came back the Europa Explorer.

  “What do we do about the Explorer?” they asked.

  Ani smiled. That was an easy question. Like the kids said. There’s nowhere else we belong.

  “We launch,” she said.

  And they did.

  Summer Ice

  Holly Phillips

  HOLLY SENT ME “Summer Ice,” and while I knew about her, and had read a few of her stories in On Spec, I wasn’t quite as aware of her talent as I should have been. So when I got around to reading her submission (full disclosure: Holly had mentioned that it had been published before, but I read the story much later, having forgotten most of the accompanying email—which I always read again when sending out my response) I forgot it was a reprint (for which I was open, if it wasn’t too high profile).

  The story immersed me, fully. I distinctly remember thinking, about halfway through, this is ‘almost’ exactly the kind of story I’m looking for. At that point I was about to send out an acceptance. But I re-read her email, to be reminded that it had been published before: originally in her collection The Palace of Repose, reprinted in the very first issue of Fantasy Magazine, and reprinted again in Prime’s The Year’s Best Fantasyof 2006.