“Gentle? It’s eating me alive.”
“It’s gentler than if the cell were to sizzle us with a strong field. It’s given us enough time to fulfill our mission.”
“How much time?”
“I estimate that in twelve hours, the material of your spacesuit will be so thin that it will rupture at the slightest movement. Then you’ll suffocate.”
“That’s reassuring. Then we need to get where we’re going as quickly as possible. What are we looking for?”
“There must be some kind of nucleus that controls everything here.”
“And then we convince it that it’s better to fly back to where it came from?”
“Something like that. But there are two more issues. We don’t know how to communicate with the nucleus, and we don’t have any idea how Triton actually moves,” Oscar said. Then he added, “That’s not entirely true. I already have an idea. I hope it turns out to be right.”
“Over there is a passage in the wall,” Oscar said.
By now, they had been walking through the cell for about 90 minutes. They hadn’t found anything reminiscent of a nucleus, just three other towers generating energy. Perhaps this passage would lead them to their destination.
“Let’s go then,” Nick said.
The corridor was locked with a bright, round disk. Nick pushed it and just beyond it there was a cave, about the height of a human, that twisted upwards in places, downwards in others. The walls were made of a soft material that reminded Nick of earwax. He loosened some from the wall and crumbled it. “Maybe we’re in the system’s ear,” he said.
“I don’t believe so. Have you noticed that the air is moving faster? As we go inwards, we push against the current.”
“No, I didn’t notice. And what does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
After ten minutes, the passageway suddenly came to an end, opening into a wide, flat hall with a circular floor area. There was the same diffuse brightness as there was everywhere else. Nick ran into the circle, but Oscar stopped at the edge.
“Come on, we don’t have time,” Nick said. He had discovered an exit on the opposite side. “Over there, it keeps going!”
“Wait,” said Oscar. “Take a look at the ceiling. Actually, you’d better just run.”
Nick had reached about the middle of the round hall. The ceiling had a shape that reminded him of the underside of a plate. The protruding ring would fit perfectly into the corresponding round slot on the floor. Could it be that the ceiling was getting lower? Hadn’t it been a little higher before?
It was getting lighter in the hall. The light-generating particles were becoming more concentrated as the ceiling lowered and compressed the air—and him along with it if he didn’t hurry away. He started running. The exit on the other side was closer than the passage they’d come from. But the ceiling was sinking faster and faster.
Nick had to drop down and crawl on all fours and he wasn’t progressing very quickly. “Oscar, I could use some help!” he shouted.
The robot didn’t answer. What should he do? Stay in the room and resist the ceiling with his hands, like Hercules? Nick tested it out, but he didn’t have the required superhuman strength. Oscar couldn’t help him. It was reasonable for him to remain safe, since otherwise he would just be crushed, too. The ceiling pushed him to the floor, and he had to stretch out his arms and legs. Nick felt like an insect that was about to be squashed. Had they run into some kind of bug trap? Hopefully Oscar would at least make it to their destination. Then he could tell his daughter how much his father had loved her.
“Oscar? Could you please tell Maria that—”
“Save your energy for later,” the robot interrupted.
The ceiling had stopped sinking. Nick lay under it, motionless. Now what would happen? Did the system just want him to freeze to death? No, he would just suffocate because his suit was disintegrating.
“Nick, you can get up slowly.”
“What?” He got back up on all fours. It was true, the ceiling had lifted back up.
“How did you do that, Oscar?”
“We left the door open, and this was the punishment.”
“What?”
“We’re in a kind of lung. When the air pressure in the cell becomes too high, the passageway door opens and the air pushes against the ceiling. The excess air pressure lifts the ceiling. When the pressure gets too low, the ceiling descends and reduces the area and the air pressure rises again. The same thing happens when you leave the door open. I closed it. That was pretty close.”
“Thank you, Oscar.”
“No problem.”
Of course, an artificial lung. Why hadn’t he thought of that? In Arizona, there was an artificial habitat, Biosphere 2, with two similarly functioning lungs. Once he’d made a trip there with Rosie. Rosie. He smiled involuntarily when he thought about her. Maybe he didn’t hate all people.
Nick pushed the round door shut behind him. It was amazingly easy to move. He hoped their oversight hadn’t activated any defense mechanisms that they don’t know about. “Which way should we go?” Nick asked.
“I’m not sure, but I think I’ve located something.”
“Something?”
“I don’t know what it is. It could just be a big radar shadow. But it must be big.”
“The nucleus? Shouldn’t it be in the center?”
“No, the nucleus can be anywhere. Because of its size, it might be more likely it would be at the bottom of the cell.”
“That’s good for us. Finally some good news.”
“That’s true. We only have nine hours left until your suit dissolves.”
“Thank you for bringing that up.”
“My pleasure, Nick.”
Their surroundings changed as they got closer to the structure that Oscar had located. They had to climb over objects that were like oversized blades of grass, though they were stiff. It looked like someone had mowed them. In fact, there were still remnants of them on the ground.
Oscar stopped. “Just a moment,” he said. His arm lowered and his hand broke something off one of the scraps of a stalk. Then he packed the chunk into his analyzer. “Fascinating. I would really like to stay here and examine everything closely.”
“What have you found?”
“The stalk consists mostly of lime and has a rectangular cross-section. But now hold on tight. There are notches engraved on the four corners.”
“Notches?” Oscar really had discovered something huge.
“The notches form a pattern. I analyzed the information content. It’s quite significant.”
“It’s some kind of writing?”
“A code. Like the DNA in our cells. But with just two letters, not four.”
“And what’s encoded there?”
“I don’t know that yet. If you don’t mind, I’ll gather some more stalks. The more material I have for reference, the sooner I can decipher the code.”
“Go ahead, Oscar.”
Since the robot was busy procuring new materials for analysis, they were progressing slowly. The radar shadow Oscar had previously located was gradually revealing its actual size. The object had to be at least 100 meters high. In its sectional view, it looked like a sausage, but it wasn’t possible yet to tell how long it was. “Is that the nucleus?” Nick asked.
“It’s hard to say. It’s a serious candidate, anyway.”
Nick enlarged the picture of the gigantic sausage in the display inside his helmet. It appeared that the surface of the object was speckled with small, dark dots. “A sausage with freckles,” he said.
“These are unlikely to be pigmentations, as is the case with freckles.”
“Oscar, I was just making a comparison. Are you making any progress with the code?”
“I think so. I’m having my database perform a comparison of the information patterns. There are similarities to chemical structural formulas.”
“So, is it a kind of DNA that’s lying arou
nd everywhere here?”
“Not just that. There are also overlaps with music and physics.”
“A bizarre combination.”
“Not at all, if we’re assuming it’s a universal communication system.”
“An alphabet that can describe all these different areas?”
“Yes, a mixture of an alphabet and a dictionary.”
“But not even humans use the same alphabet to write down their music, their knowledge of science, and their dreams.”
“I’m sorry, Nick, but people are a bit primitive. I also use a universal language to store everything—the binary code. But you’re right. When I store a painting, it’s always just a more or less good digital copy of an analog object. There’s just one single existence of the painting, but I can create millions of digital copies of it. But the code on the stalks expresses the original. Do you understand what I mean?”
“No more than half, Oscar.”
“That’s more than I’d expected of you.”
Up close, the object looked less like a sausage and more like a cylinder. The freckles were small, rectangular indentations on its surface. There were uncountably many of them. Who had designed it this way? Nick felt like a microbe in the body of a living organism. He had to keep telling himself that the thing they’d been wandering around in for hours probably constituted no more than a single cell.
What would an organism consisting of millions of such cells look like? If one existed, it would have to be massive. Was this where legends about giants came from? Or did cells like these not appear in groups at all? Apparently, the cell was in control of all of its needs, including movement. And there was also their goal to think about. How would they be able to convince this creature to take flight before falling into human hands?
“Look, it’s moving,” said Oscar.
Nick saw one of the stalks leaning against the cylindrical object tipping over. Oscar must have placed it there. The cell nucleus, or what they thought was a cell nucleus, appeared to be rolling across the ground very slowly.
Nick bent down and examined what the cylinder left in its wake. They were fragments from the stalks. “We have to get on the front side,” he said. “In the direction it’s moving.”
“Do you want to get rolled over?”
“No. Movement costs energy. No living thing moves if it doesn’t have any.”
Nick walked around the cell nucleus on the left and Oscar followed. It simply had to be the nucleus—they hadn’t found anything else, and they didn’t have much more time to look for it. Nick was suddenly standing in a cornfield in front of the cylinder. The stalks towered one meter above him. As a boy, he’d liked to play hide and seek in the cornfield until one time he encountered a wild hog that had felt threatened. There won’t be any wild hogs here, he thought, and ran into the field.
Then he turned and observed the cell nucleus, which was rolling forward slowly. The first stalks hit the outer skin, and some snapped immediately. Others disappeared into the rectangular holes. About half of the stalks remained as waste, while the other half were absorbed by the nucleus. Was this how it grew?
“Do you see that, Oscar? Does the nucleus feed on the stalks?”
“There has to be more to it. The information on the stalks gets into the nucleus this way. I’ll bet it gets processed there somehow.”
“But half the stalks are wasted. It’s not efficient.”
“A random selection takes place. This way, information is recombined. I do the same thing when I’m bored. The nucleus gathers data and recombines it.”
“Just like with heredity and DNA?” Nick asked.
“Yes, but this system doesn’t differentiate genetic information from other data. This is brilliant. The cell doesn’t need computers or any separate data memory.”
“But where do the stalks with this information come from?”
“I don’t know. They grow. The nucleus must share the processed information in a specific way. We’re only getting one part of the picture here. I suspect that this cell’s life cycle is much slower than what we’re used to. It’s made it billions of years without dying. To really understand the process, we’d have to stay here for a few thousand years at least.”
“But we’ve just got four hours left,” said Nick. “And in that time we have to convince it to comply with our request.”
“Does it make you feel better that I’ve already got an idea?”
“It does. Can you tell me about it?”
“We construct some of these stalks ourselves, describe them in the special code, and have them processed by the nucleus.”
“You can do that?”
“I think so, though I’m not certain. But we’ll be able to tell by how the nucleus reacts.”
“And how would the nucleus then communicate with us? Do you think we even exist for it? Do we move too fast?”
“If the experiment works, Triton will fly away back to where it came from. Then we’ll be able to tell if we’ve succeeded.”
“I need the longest stalks possible,” said Oscar. “Hurry!”
Nick dug around in the debris left by the cylinder. The longest fragments were perhaps one meter long. He gathered as many as he could carry and brought them to Oscar.
“What are you standing around for? I need a lot more.”
“I... I’m on my way.” He picked up the next batch, then another, and set everything down next to Oscar. The robot kept him busy. Whenever he’d make his way back to the robot, the stalk he was working on had grown by about half a meter.
“Don’t stop. I need more.”
“Isn’t that enough? The stalk is around the same size as the others in the field.”
“We need at least ten of them. Let’s go!”
“You’re a slave driver.”
“I’m saving your life, Nick.”
He couldn’t argue with that. He ran back to the field of debris, gathered what he thought would be useful, and brought his harvest to Oscar, over and over again. This arduous task had at least one advantage. He didn’t have to think about the thread from which his life was hanging.
“You carry the stalks and give me one after the other, and I feed the nucleus with them.”
“Wouldn’t it be faster if we did everything together at the same time?”
“No, Nick. I suspect it’s important for our information to get into the nucleus through the same hole. Then it’ll be processed in succession.”
“You suspect?”
“I hope. With such a short amount of time, I haven’t found a way to mark the correct sequence. So we have to make sure the order is correct. I’ve marked them on the top side with different numbers of dots so you won’t mix them up when you give them to me.”
“Got it. Let’s go.”
They moved back around the colossus. In the meantime, the cylinder had only progressed about ten meters. Nick handed the robot the first stalk and Oscar positioned himself so he could easily reach the nucleus. With his flexible arm, he pushed the stalk into the right position and waited until the tip of the stalk slipped almost by itself into the rectangular hole.
“This could take forever,” said Nick.
“If we wait for the nucleus to swallow the stalk, we’d need about one hour per stalk.”
In ten hours, Nick would be dead. It was a strange feeling to be able to state it so precisely. “But we won’t wait.” Oscar pushed his arm further up and shoved the stalk into the hole until it stopped. “Next one,” he said.
Nick handed him the next piece, which disappeared into the same hole. Slowly the massive cylinder rolled towards them.
“Number three,” Oscar ordered.
Nick looked through the stalks he was holding in his left arm for the one with three dots. Then he had to step backward because the nucleus was getting too close.
“Fourth.”
Oscar fed the nucleus with the next stalk. How quickly would it process the information? On Earth, cells usually transmitted in
formation chemically. With this huge nucleus, it could take days.
“Come on, Nick, we’re almost halfway done.”
He gave the robot the fifth stalk. The hole they were feeding moved slowly downwards. Oscar had to move his arm a bit to be able to insert the stalk.
“Six.”
They should have started with a hole that was higher up, even though it would have been harder to reach. But it was too late for such thoughts.
“Seven.”
Nick placed the stalk directly into the robot’s hand. He took a step backward and stumbled, just barely catching himself. His heart was racing.
“Eight—almost done,” said Oscar.
Almost. Yes! The hole they wanted to put all the stalks in was now just one meter above the ground. Nick wouldn’t stand a chance, but the robot was flat enough.
“Nine. Quickly!”
Nick knelt and held out the second-to-last stalk to Oscar. Could he do it? He looked at the last stalk in his arm. It had nine dots. It should have been ten. Crap! He’d mixed up the stalks!
“Oscar, wait. I gave you the wrong one!” he shouted loudly, holding out the ninth at the same time. The robot didn’t answer as he took the stalk from him.
“The ninth is already in,” Oscar said, “but it’s too late for the last one. I can’t get close to the hole anymore. I’ll use another hole.”
“Shit!” yelled Nick. He’d screwed it up. It was his own fault if his daughter had to grow up without him. This wasn’t the first mistake he’d made, but there was no fixing this one.
“Shit! Shit!” he shouted, throwing himself on the ground.
The cell nucleus was just about to roll over him, but Oscar’s hand pulled him away. “Now calm down,” he said. “I put the last stalk, the one with the nine dots, into another hole. We don’t know anything about the capabilities that the nucleus has. Maybe it can arrange our information logically. Naturally, I put the most crucial information at the beginning. The rest explains the reason for our request.”
The Triton Disaster: Hard Science Fiction (Solar System Series Book 4) Page 24