Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  But according to the heartbreaking logic of the arrow of time, it could not be undone.

  For a while Ange busied herself to prevent herself brooding on the idiocy of everything. She wrapped Ostriker’s corpse, but rather than manoeuvre it upship past all the bulkheads, opening and shutting each laboriously in turn, she left it in the medical room, dialling down the heating to make the space preservingly cold. Then she cleaned the chamber and the corridor vigorously, removing the many floating patches and wall smears of blood and other dirt. But there was only so much to occupy herself. The earlier candidates for unluck seemed foolishly trivial now. Even Maurice’s death in the fastness of his cabin. That had been his own silly fault. But Ange felt a frustrating sense of complicity-by-incompetence in the death of Ostriker.

  It was the insignificance of it that was the most irritating thing. A human death ought to be a grand and tragic affair, not a footling stupid mistake like this. But that was the logic of the crowd. Some few humans met death with dignity and grace; some few died in ridiculous and comical ways, but the bulk of the Poisson distribution was mean, pointless, insignificant demises. Of all the great philosophers and religious figures, it was Copernicus who was the greatest, for he alone had preached the truth to humankind: you are not special.

  For Ange, dealing with that was something best essayed alone.

  ~ * ~

  3. Second contact

  She was alone again, and that was alright; although being alone in her house, with its beautifully manicured garden, was a different thing to operating a basket-case spaceship in the company of two corpses. There was a further leak, which threw the ship into a shimmy-shake and slow toptail rotation. Ange tweaked and adjusted her attitudinals to cancel this new irregular trajectory, but doing this shook free further jinks in the system. Breathing air flooded into the void in a swarm of crystals. For one heart-bumping moment Ange thought she wasn’t going to be able to seal off the delinquent pipe from the main supply, and she entertained crazy ideas of having to suit up, go out and stuff rags or something in the hole. But then she was able to seal the vent, and only a few days’ breathable air lost.

  She wondered if she ought to keep a tally of unlucks; but that felt like itself an unlucky thing to do. The tossed coin may keep coming up tails, but the coin itself doesn’t know that; it goes into every tumble and spin with the beautiful clarity of 50:50 as its outcome.

  She did not talk to herself. Only people disinclined to solitude, or people who only mistakenly believe that they enjoy solitude, talk to themselves when they are alone. She was perfectly at ease by herself, and went about her business. Besides, what was there to say?

  There was a fire in one of the forward compartments, and the automatic dampeners failed (because she had - to make assurance doubly sure - sealed off all tubules with anything less than 100% structural integrity). By the time she had gotten the pipes open, the dampener head had melted and fused in the heat. She was forced into uncomfortable passivity as the fire burnt through to the shielding supplies of ice and burnt itself out. But this weakened the whole forward portion of the craft. For the first time she began to weigh the chances that she would never make it back to Earth. Rescue was still weeks away, and her entire tech-system was now precariously balanced. It would take only a few more malfunctions to finish her off.

  Still, she lived another day. And then another day after that.

  She suited up and, despite the discomfort, stayed that way; sleeping with the helmet hooked beside her. The air started smelling bad, and she discovered - after a long, wearisome search - that mould was growing inside the recycle pipes. She cleared as much of this out as she could, although there wasn’t a way to get at the most deeply located colonies of the stuff short of physically dismantling the entire system. She ate. She drank water. She slept. She lived another day. She thought about all the things in her life that would be rendered forever unfinished by her death. But then she thought to herself: anticlimax is the currency of mortality. If I live, she decided, and get home again I will write a work of philosophy, explaining how Copernicus revolutionised our living and dying as well as our cosmology. All those Greek tragedies, all that Shakespehehrian to-do about death, the distinguished thing - it all belonged to that pre-Copernican delusion of our importance. Only an important being can have a significant death! An unimportant entity dies, as she was doing (there was little point in denying it), stupidly, belatedly, unexpectedly, in a downbeat banal accidental way. The modern mode of it.

  She went to sleep, her underarms and crotch sore from the tightness of her suit. She did not dream. She was woken by the silent flashing of a red light, winking knowingly at her.

  The first thing she did was wonder why there was no sound. The alarm light should have been accompanied by an alarm noise. The speaker was broken, or else there was no air in the cabin to communicate the sound. In the latter case, she would suffocate. Half awake, she reached for her helmet, but it was not there. She woke up a little more, perked by adrenalin. Where was her helmet? Muzzy with exhaustion and stress and not having slept enough, it took her a long time to realise that she was wearing it.

  She must have put it on whilst she slept. There was no air in the cabin, which meant there was no air anywhere this side of the corridor bulkhead. How had the decompression alarm prompted her to put on her helmet, but not actually woken her up? Then: and how had there been a decompression anyway, here so far aft? Another micrometeorite? She went through to the corridor, checked the various chambers, her own breathing like surf inside her ears. Everything was empty, the lights bright white, or else winking red circles. Twelve hours of air in her tank, and then swap over for other tanks, and within a few score hours - her own death.

  Cast a cold eye.

  No, not twelve hours: she had already used some of that air, sleeping. And now, as she began the conversation, she was compos mentis enough to wonder if this was a tank she had failed to replenish, or one with a slow puncture. She wondered that because it could be that the conversation was a function of hypoxia, a kind of hallucination. Who was there to converse with, rationally speaking? But the tank seemed fine, and she had plenty of oxygen in her bloodstream. But the conversation continued.

  You’re not even from Cygnus. She went and forced open the first of the corridor bulkheads, and was knocked back by the turbulence. Air on the other side, flooding through. Stupid, she thought: you should have found the location of the breach on this side and patched it before you opened the bulkhead! But, actually, the dust and grits and bits of floating debris were flowing down the corridor and round and into the rear store chamber, and there Ange saw, holding onto the doorway to stop herself being blown right through, that a circular hole, a metre in diameter, had been carved right through the flank of the ship. A brand-new hole, perfectly circular. Impossibility. You’re not from Cygnus and we know you’re not from Cygnus, so why do we call you Cygnics?

  ‘It doesn’t bother us, one way or another. It’s only a name. Names are always arbitrary, when you get right down to it.’

  How could there be a perfectly circular hole in the side of her ship? Ange shut the store chamber door, and could no longer see the big hole. Seal away the room with the breach. Then she went forward up the corridor. She overrode the command and forced open the next bulkhead, and then the one after that, and then the one after that. Each time she was buffeted and blown back by the air coming through, but she made her way along repeating the gesture.

  ‘Why did you go?’

  ‘Spooked, we were spooked. It was touch and go, all the way along. ‘

  ‘Is that why you hung back, all the way out amongst the Oort cloud? Too scared to come any closer?’

  ‘Precisely so.’

  ‘The sun? Some people reasoned that there was something about the particular spectrum of our sun that was toxic to your kind. Some even suggested that explained the Fermi paradox - that something in our sun kept aliens away. But there didn’t seem
to be anything odd about our sun. There are billions of stars with similar spectra. Out there.’

  There was no reply. How odd to be taking to yourself, and yet to be so rude as not to reply! The last of the bulkheads was opened, and Ange started on the remaining doors. There wasn’t going to be much air behind any of these, taken as a whole. It was not clear that the air pressure would be raised to any liveable level. But she had to try.

  ‘I always thought,’ she said, to pass the time, as much as anything, ‘I always thought the thing the Fermi so-called paradox ignored was our tininess. We’re sand fleas. Why should any alien races want to come visit?’

  ‘Oh, no. Oh very much no. That’s not it at all.’

  ‘Really ?’

  ‘Oh very much the opposite! Very much the opposite!’

  ‘Why did you come, you Cygnics?’

  There were seven doors to open, and she opened them all. This distributed whatever air remained in those sealed chambers about the whole ship. But it was at a very low bar.

  ‘The thing, the thing, the puzzling thing, for us, the thing.’

  This was too annoying. She didn’t have much time left! Come along, she snapped. Don’t stammer and mumble.

  ‘To come to the centre of the universe? Cant you see how much courage that voyage entails?’

  Ange had an itch on her chin, and she hunched her shoulders to bring her head down sufficiently to be able to scratch it against the inside of the helmet seal. ‘What? The universe doesn’t have a centre. Don’t be ridiculous.’

  She went back to the rear cockpit, but there was no good news on the air-pressure front. There simply wasn’t enough air to sustain life. This thought occupied her mind for a while, and she considered alternatives. Then the notion of the centre of the universe reoccurred to her, and she snapped at her invisible interlocutor (herself, presumably),’The universe doesn’t have a centre! Where is this centre of the centre, where is this omphalos you’re talking about?’

  ‘Of course, right here.’

  ‘Of course,’ she scoffed. ‘Here?’

  ‘Earth, actually.’

  ‘You’re saying Copernicus was wrong? The Earth is the centre of the Universe? Hah!’

  ‘It’s why we came. It’s also why it took us such a long time. To come, I mean. We were afraid. It’s like cutting a slit in the veil of the temple and stepping through into the holy of holies.‘

  ‘Why did you, then?’

  ‘You keep adding people to people. You keep making more consciousnesses, and breeding more human beings. You keep doing it!’

  ‘Not I,’ said Ange, fiercely, thinking of her own rationally chosen childlessness.

  ‘That’s exactly it! You know what dark energy is?’

  But she had no time for that sort of non-question. She had practical matters to address. There were six suit tanks, and she was breathing one of them now. Say, another six hours in this one, plus sixty hours in the other five. Less than three days. Was there a way she could compress, or distil, the tenuous air that now circulated through the cabin? Even if she could construct a machine for doing that, how much time would it give her?

  Inspired by some left-field insight into something-or-other, Ange threw a question out that chanced to hit the eye of the bull, bullseye, centre-target.

  ‘How many of you came here, anyway?’

  ‘Three.’ The reply was immediate.

  Odd that nobody else had asked that question so specifically, during all the earlier interactions between human and Cygnic.

  ‘You left the rest of your people at home?’

  ‘Our people?’

  ‘Your civilisation.’

  ‘We are our civilisations. Three separate, entire civilisations. Come to visit you.’

  ‘One from each? Three home worlds? It must be an honour to be the chosen representative.’

  ‘You’re being dense and dumb. Listen: I am my civilisation, entire.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ange, who was feeling hungry, and wondering how she might smuggle pieces of food into her helmet and thence to her mouth without dying of asphyxiation in the process.

  ‘You see?’

  ‘I see infinity in a grain of sand,’ she said, unsure why she did so.

  ‘The thing we have found hardest to grasp is your lack of self-knowledge in this matter,’ said the alien, haughtily.

  ‘I don’t even know,’ said Ange, ‘that haughty is a phrase that means anything to you. Who knows what alien emotions are like?’

  ‘You’re the alien,’ said the Cygnic.

  ‘We’re alien to one another. I suppose it’s relative.’

  ‘No,’ said the Cygnic. ‘It’s not. We’re not the aliens. You are.’

  ‘I don’t see how that works,’ Ange replied, a little crossly. ‘What’s sauce for the goose is . . .’ But she couldn’t remember how that phrase went.

  ‘There are more than twenty billion human beings on Earth.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So,’ said the alien, as if that summed everything up.

  ‘How many of your species are there? Billions, I don’t doubt. Maybe trillions, since you clearly have the technology to spread yourself all around the galaxy.’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Yes, you. How many are there of you?’

  ‘Just me.’

  ‘That’s what I’m asking.’

  ‘I’m answering. Just me.’

  Ange thought about this, and it sunk in. It percolated through. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘So when you said there are three of you . . .’

  ‘Three separate entities. We united to make this pilgrimage; it’s an almost unprecedented event in Galactic history. But it was important.’

  ‘And you are,’ she said. ‘What - the last of your race? What happened to all the others? Dead?’

  ‘There never have been any others. I am the first and last. The same with every other intelligence in the cosmos. Intelligence is singular, of course.’

  And then, fractal-like, the implications of this statement unfolded and unfolded the more she looked at it. ‘Good grief,’ she said.

  ‘Life is multifarious, of course. And there are even intelligent hive-like creatures’, I’ve met one myself. But in such cases, the hive adds up to one intelligence. That’s the logic of the universe. A form of life arises, and comes to consciousness and rational capacity. Intelligence is a rare, singular thing. Except here! Here it is an insane profusion. Think of it like this: you travel about meeting people. You meet an intelligent person in this place, and then you meet another intelligent person, and then you meet another intelligent person, and then, madly, you meet a person whose every single cell is intelligent, sentient, self-aware. It would strike you as crazy, impossible, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Good God,’ said Ange.

  ‘This is the only place in the Universe where this is true,’ said the alien.

  ‘How can you know that?’ Ange asked. ‘Surely you haven’t visited every star!’

  ‘This is the only place,’ the alien repeated. ‘The structure and form of the cosmos itself shows that to be true. There can only be one centre, after all. ‘

  ‘What?’

  ‘Intelligence is a profound thing. Intelligent observation interacts with and alters the nature of reality itself, at a quantum level. You know this already! You know about your cat-in-boxes, and particle-waves, and observational biases. But you haven’t thought it through. My intelligence alters the universe through which I move, but it’s only one intelligence, so it doesn’t make much of an impact. But here! Billions of intelligences, all concentrated in one place! Such a huge force of focused consciousness, hundreds of millions of times more intense than all other cosmic intelligence put together! It’s a kind of insanity! It has — wholly — distorted spacetime. And the more intelligences you add to the core the more that is true. It’s like a black hole, except that the effect is not quasi-gravitational, but something the reverse. You hav
e the science to see it, although you don’t understand it. You call it dark energy. ‘

  ‘That can’t be right,’ said Ange. ‘Dark energy is something spread out through the whole cosmos.’

  ‘No it isn’t.’

  ‘It’s pushing the galaxies apart!’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, alas. It is doing that. But it is not spread out. It is concentrated here.’

  ‘That’s not what our observations lead us to believe.’