Other than the cluttered bookshelf, it was clinical in there, all white with Virtuals — with their slightly off look when projected — everywhere.
“Why did you adopt me?” I asked, the question coming out of nowhere.
“You needed to be safe. You were all over the news and everybody wanted you dead. So we adopted you; that gave you EU citizenship to protect you from the US and her clients. Plus, that turned news coverage to cute and cuddly and away from son of mass murderers.”
“And what was in it for you?”
He hesitated, looking at the projected artworks around the room. I realised he was looking for something to hang a lesson on. Not finding it, he was forced to come clean.
“You filled the gap between us.”
~~~
“Stoney, do you think it’s too soon?”
“It was always going to be too fucking soon. I wish I’d never come.”
He speaks as though he were talking about a school trip.
Perhaps for him it was, raised as he’d been from birth to to be an engineer on the ship. Provided as he’d been with the modifications necessary for ship engineer, plus ones for sunny optimism.
Now, Unity controls the engines and his optimism circuits have burned out.
“It’s too late to back out now. It’s begun.”
The vast amount of now redundant code contains about 0.005% extra code. Foreseeing this, I had forced my parents to infiltrate an adaptive virus. It was left untouched through three millennia on the general principle that no one screws with working code.
~~~
For a time I was a media darling, especially the US media which loved the symbolism surrounding me. I was even presented with US citizenship by the First Husband. A poisoned gift in a Europe moving steadily towards virulent anti-US feeling once again.
Then came the virus, then the media backlash. Nine years old and lost in the gale of rage at my mum and dad.
I relied more and more on my paranoid nurse from Carlisle. It was she who told me, “When the US found out that England was providing arms to Western Sahara, undermining it in its Northern Africa wars, the US invaded.”
It had the pleasing rhythm of a bedtime story. The dreamlike feel of one as well.
All the bodies were buried under a comforting layer of words.
One day the nano sheet came loose and the doctors said I was as healed as I could be. They showed me my ruined back and said it was a miracle of modern medicine that I was alive, let alone with skin on my back.
They threw me in front of the media who assumed that my tears were of gratitude.
The next day a Scotsman and a Russian woman appeared in front of me. “We would like to adopt you. We would like to be your mummy and daddy, my darling. Would you like that?”
Father smiling blandly. The cameras blindly watching.
It was the first and only time she called me darling.
~~~
I held, via Mother and Father, Russian, Scottish and EU citizenships. Courtesy of the First Husband, last seen hanging from a lamp-post near the Whitehouse, I had US citizenship.
I was also part of the very small group with English citizenship, a potentially lethal affiliation, and one that caused problems during the crew selection process.
The bureaucracy functioned as it should and defaulted to whichever flag fit the system best.
People were a different matter.
I stubbornly insisted on wearing a badge with St. George’s cross on it. The little splotch of red and white tended to produce a cascade of reactions.
First, horror that someone would wear such a symbol.
Second, horror at finding out where I was from.
Finally, a strange mix of horror, sympathy and anger on my explaining who I was.
I made the crew, of course. With my connections and skillset there was no doubt I would. In true Ageless fashion, training was scheduled to take the rest of the construction and fueling phases of Unity. That was about twenty years.
We all held down high-powered jobs during this time, too. Immortal, heavily modified overachievers need plenty of outlets.
~~~
Subverting the human accessible parts of the system was the easy part.
Now we need to, in Virtual design jargon, build our project, understand our project, memorise our project.
Building is proceeding at a satisfying pace.
The 188 who refused to join us are corralled in a large blank room and left to get bored.
The twelve conspirators are engineers, astrophysicists, cosmologists, Virtual designers and myself, a monad analyst. I moonlight as a numismatist, though.
After we reveal our true purpose to the 188, we gain a few recruits including, crucially, a semiotician, along for the ride in case the Unity encountered any alien symbol sets.
“Why didn’t you ask me earlier? I would have joined willingly.”
“We wanted to keep our numbers to a minimum. You’ll be working on the deep symbolism of the structure. The team includes two Virtual designers and an architect. There’s a parallel Real team consisting of engineers and another architect.”
“Is all that design firepower really needed?”
“It’s the largest thing ever made. If we don’t get any more recruits we’ll have to start training in secondary specialties. That could take decades and I want at least a skeleton of this thing out there inside five years.”
~~~
The pre-launch parties were dull, formal affairs. The ones on the ship were worse — expensive wine and food, stilted conversation, billionaire crew sneering at guests worth mere hundreds of millions.
Launch itself was fairly spectacular. An antimatter Orion drive with AM bombs exploding against a giant kickplate to provide smooth 1g acceleration.
~~~
Now that the team’s highly skilled brain map analyst has installed and activated my leadership modifications, I’ve become more confident, I smile more often, and I see people in simpler terms than before, as components in a larger structure.
I’m one of the few who still rest at night, an hour of sleep improving my thinking the next day. It also allows me, for a few moments, to drop the itchy, eyes-too-wide leadership pose.
I’ve also been able to return to my twin loves of monad analysis — a very arcane study of the small-scale interface between Virtual and Real — and numismatics, the study of the mathematics of coins, the latest theorized objects believed to underpin space-time.
Coins of all shapes, sizes, orientation and spin fill space, their edges representing a very localised entropy measurement. Every coin is unique and distinct — or rather, their relations between each other are, coins themselves not existing except within these relations.
And yet, for all that coins are distinct and unique, they all map continuously onto each other.
~~~
Centuries into the voyage we conspirators met for the first time on the ship. It was our last chance to stop the program.
I’d guilted Mother and Father into installing the dog virus during construction.
“Short of a block-by-block deconstruction it’s invisible,” Aileen, a software engineer, assured us.
“The skeleton is built in Virtual,” I said. “Filling it out will be by far the bigger job. I’m going to need a semiotician, someone to deal with the deep symbolic structure of this thing. People won’t be able to use it if they don’t believe in it, so we need a usable symbol set, only this one needs to be larger and run deeper that anything built before. Actually, a Jungian analyst might be more useful.”
“No more weird specializations. Someone learning that would definitely attract attention. Joanne?”
Our nano specialist told us that one-third of the ship’s mass, when converted to nano, would be enough. No one liked to think too hard about what that level of conversion would look like.
Every one of the twelve agreed to continue with the plan. This was easy to do when it was still a game, before time
and distance could only be overcome by converting Unity into a lump of glittering clay.
~~~
The teams gradually grow larger and Unity lends us computing resources, a sure sign of its approval. Progress is slow with each of us having to learn new specialisations. Our parents, generalists all, would despise us.
Small clouds of smart dust are released aft, dying in milliseconds, abraded by the gas and dust clouds. More complex and tougher dust is launched and lasts long enough to reproduce.
New dust that forms light-mediated links is launched. These links form distributed computing networks, which allow the rapid computations needed to form and maintain chains and nets.
Dumb matter chains that form and break millions of times a second link smart matter clumps that pump out speckled laser light. They shine like dappled stars and sing I am here! I am here! Now I am here! like lost children on a beach.
A three-dimensional net forms, infinitely flexible, growing larger with time.
A final burst of pure viral computing dust is released into the net, filling gaps, being reproduced by the old bacterial dust. Being smart.
I project myself into the sparsely distributed structure and find myself in a gently undulating net of cloud, each intersection marked by a blazing star.”Indras Net,” says the soft non-voice of Unity. “You must know about that given your ancestry, Sri.”
“I’m English, all the way back to the corner shop. Don’t be racist.”
“Sorry.”
I can sense it smile, a gin-and-tonic over fresh-mown grass.
“What’s the point, Sri? I promise you’ll all be safe in me and I’ll re-incarnate you when we reach the Destination. Why this elaborate scheme to get away?”
“If you didn’t already know, you wouldn’t have given us so much support.” I relent, though, and tell it what it wants to know. “It’s a Bridge. It’s sparsely linked, it wobbles a lot and it’s going to be very long. But it could carry people and objects far easier than you — in pods with life support, like the Jules Verne gondola. It’s designed to carry dumb matter objects by disassemble-move-reassemble.
“Above all, it’s a symbol, made up of symbols. Other bridges give it a gentle curve and pylons. There are hydrogen bond analogues in there. There are assemblages that look like coin lattices. There are hundreds of other symbolic linkages in there, mapped into it by our semioticians and Virtual designers.”
“It’s a mess Sri.” Thunderclouds over that perfect lawn. “A barely coherent jumble of smart matter, dumb matter and light.”
I make the beauty of the current representation fall away to reveal the ugly truth. Symbolic cancers ripple over a landscape of randomly shimmering numbers.
“That’s why I’m here. To fix this this. In two thousand years this Bridge will be the largest, most beautiful structure the species has ever built. You will be at the Destination and the Bridge will give you a way back to heal Earth.”
“You will fail, Sri. This is certain. The others know this and will not come.” Rain falls across the grass, mixed with a bitter smell of burned oil. “You deleted your indexes. No copies can be made of you now. Why?”
I start to understand the Bridge and I stabilise the numbers over a large section of it. The cancers disappear. “I want to be an angel and angels can only be in one place at a time. If the others won’t come, I’ll be the whole of the Bridge. The maps are sophisticated enough to allow that.”
“I can’t support this project anymore. I never anticipated you failing so comprehensively, so quickly.”
I plant a million saplings. They die but one hundred grow green shoots.
“I understand. All I want is to build bridges: bridges with our technology, bridges between us, bridges within us, bridges to our past. You should want that too, Unity.” I’m far enough gone into angelhood that my laughter is yellow blossoms blowing in a breeze.
We are all dead. Yet soon I will make us alive as anyone in our species has ever been.
Soon I will begin to walk the Bridge, memorizing as I go.
~~~
KEN BURSTALL is a middle-aged Englishman living in Austin Texas, with far too many children. He works, intermittently, as an oilfield geologist, and has calculated that he has spent six of the last twenty years on oil rigs far offshore. “Connect” is his first published story. He has a strange, unpopular weblog at http://fallslikesnow.blogspot.com/.
Fleeing with the last remnants of the Oshen race, Indigo has only one chance to ensure his people are never forgotten.
INDIGO’s GAMBIT
by Adam Israel
Three. Two. One. Bang.
The Drifting Star skipped on the wave of a collapsing micro-sun, soaring through the void between the stars. The astronautical library contained surveys and charts on hundreds of thousands of star systems within the alliance of civilized worlds the Fringe called Sing Xu. This would be the thirty-eighth Indigo had visited since his journey toward the core planets began. So far none contained a world suitable to revive the Oshen race.
Indigo’s three light-blue fingers and thumb moved gingerly across the computer console. The sinewy web between each digit was dried and cracked, as was much of his skin. Too long away from home — or what was left of it. His last memory of home was of fire raining down from the warships in orbit and the seas burning as he fled in his stolen scout ship. Now he and the fertilized eggs preserved in the cryotank at his feet were all that remained of the Oshen.
Navigation confirmed the ship’s arrival at the edge of Theta 4127, a six-planet system with a single red giant. He plotted a course toward the fourth planet, close enough for the scanners to analyze the surface. If the environmental conditions didn’t match the specific balance the Oshen needed to survive, he would continue to the next system, never stopping until he found one that was suitable.
The Oshen had been content living beneath the seas and on the land, ignorant to what was happening among the stars. Indigo had never heard of the Sing Xu or the Fringe until the first scout ship arrived. Soon after, more Fringe vessels appeared, offering promises of knowledge and prosperity in exchange for the naturally occurring mineral that the Fringe needed to construct their ships.
The two races worked together to excavate and process the mineral. Some of the Oshen, like Indigo, showed an aptitude for the alien technology and worked with the Fringe on their assembly lines. Life was good for the Oshen, until the land was stripped of its resources. That’s when their relationship with the Fringe ended, along with their hopes for the future.
Indigo leaned forward in his seat and scrutinized the results of the planetary scan. Sixty percent dry land but the seas contained a high concentration of sulfur — too high for Oshen physiology.
Another system, another disappointment. Thousands left to visit. The search continued.
The next potential system on the list would take three skips to reach. Once he programmed the destination into the navigation system, the ship settled into a stationary orbit and began the calculations for the first skip. The only thing to do now was wait.
An alarm blared inside the small cabin. Indigo sat up stiffly and tightened his grip on the chair. The countdown to skip was still running. All of the ship’s systems were normal. He cycled through the external cameras, looking for any sign of trouble. The dorsal aspect appeared on screen and Indigo caught his breath. Just within camera view was the last thing he ever wanted to see again: a Fringe warship.
The enemy vessel must have just skipped into the system. If not for the energy signature of the skip, he might not have known they were there until it was too late. As it was, it would take them a few moments to get their bearings and notice their stolen ship hanging prone below them. Ninety ticks left on the countdown and any course change or movement would reset the clock.
Indigo turned the comm to an open channel. He just had to stall them for a short time.
“Attention Fringe vessel,” he said in his native tongue. “I am Indigo of the Oshen. I esc
aped the destruction of my world by your warships, the last witness to your ruthless genocide. And I would like to negotiate my surrender.”
Thirty ticks and counting. The extra ticks it took to run his transmission through the translation filter could mean the difference between life and death.
“Oshen.” The slow, rough Fringe voice rolled the word over his tongue as if savoring it. “The last of your race. Your escape only delayed the inevitable. It is time you joined your people in oblivion.”
Fifteen ticks to go.
“Wait,” Indigo said. “I can still be of value to you. I worked in the factories, was trained to fly your cargo ships.”
“You are inferior, easily replaced. We have no use for you.”
Ten ticks. The jump drive started spooling up, something their sensors were sure to detect.
Silence from the comm. The stalling was over.
Five ticks. Their guns would be locking on, if they weren’t already. The order to fire would be given.
Three. Two. One.
The jump drive engaged as the Fringe ship opened fire. The Drifting Star lurched and disappeared.
~~~
The Drifting Star popped back into normal space. Indigo’s teeth chattered and his blue skin was already mottling with deep reds and purples where it had collided with the console. The discharge from the Fringe weapon had done more than knock him out of his seat. Red lights on the console flashed and the deafening blare of alarms filled the cabin.
Fire suppression systems had been activated all over the ship. The jump drive registered offline and the repair subsystem estimated over six hours to restoration. The ship was self-sufficient; Indigo begrudgingly gave the Fringe credit for that much. He wished he could speed up time, though. It wouldn’t take long for the Fringe warship to follow.
One by one he silenced the alerts, until the only ringing was in his ears. According to the logs, the blast from the Fringe hit at the exact moment the jump drive engaged, knocking the ship off-course. He was lucky he didn’t materialize inside a planet or star.
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