Edge of Infinity (25 page)

Laxmi changed the subject. “What have you been doing to Cha?”

“Trying to get him to recover from his amnesia.”

Sophie explained about the ‘blue dot,’ and ‘Old Cha’s’ ingenious way of dealing with the challenge to his delusion.

“I hoped he’d figure out the implications, and remember that the bizarre business about being an elderly immortal alien intelligence was actually his secret safe room –”

“Typical Cha, that scenario. He is
such
a textbook weird geek.”

“He didn’t come to his senses, but in a way it worked. Now he’s very keen to send himself as a signal to Earth, which is great because that’s exactly what we need to do. I just have to find a way to contact the orbiter, and I think Josh can help me –”

“Do you even know the Medici is still alive, Sophie?”

“Er, yeah? I’m the monitor of the array, the radio telescope. I can see Medici, or strictly speaking maybe
hear
it, but you know what I mean. It’s not only out there, it’s still in its proper orbit. Ergo and therefore, Medici is alive and kicking, it’s just not talking to us.”

“
You can see it
,” repeated Laxmi, staring at Sophie intently. “Of course. My God.”

Sophie had a sudden insight into why she had remained sane. Maybe she wasn’t unusually wise and resilient: just the stranded astronaut who happened to have reason to believe there was still a way home –

“You never approved of me,” she said. “You always made me feel inferior.”

“I don’t approve of people who need my approval.”

“I’d settle for co-operation,” said Sophie, boldly.

“Not so fast. Why do you call the data
straw
?”

“You’ve been spying on me,” said Sophie, resignedly. “Like the Three Little Pigs, you know? Bricks, sticks, straw: building materials for my habitat. I was imaging things I could remember easily, the way the psych guys taught us.”

“But
Sticks
turned into a guard dog. Who am I? The Big Bad Wolf?”

“The Big Bad Wolf is death.”

“Okay... What makes you think Josh knows anything?”

“He said
we have to think of a way to blow up the orbiter.
He could do that, from the surface of Ganymede – if he was crazy enough – but only in software. He’s not planning to launch a
missile
. So he must have some kind of encryption-hack in mind.”

The suppurating evil-alien screenface had calmed down, by degrees, as Laxmi fired off her questions. She looked almost like herself, as she considered this explanation.

“Give me everything you’ve got,” she said. “I need to think about this.”

And vanished.

S
OPHIE INITIATED ANOTHER
tour of inspection. The absorbing routine soothed her, and kept her out of trouble. She was hopeful. She had seen Laxmi’s human face, and surely that meant a return to sanity, but she felt she needed to play it cool:
Let her come to me
... At least she should be less worried about sudden data-death. But she wasn’t. Dread snapped at her heels. She kept suffering little lapses, tiny blackouts, frightening herself.

And
where was Sticks?

How long had he been gone? How long had she been naked, stripped of her Security? Sophie flew to the house in the dunes, and Sticks was there, a huddled shape in the misty dark, tumbled on the sand at the back door. She knelt and touched him, whimpering his name. He tried to lick her hands, but he couldn’t lift his head. Pain stood in his eyes; he was dying.

This is how a software clone goes mad. Just one extra thing happens, and it’s too much. You cannot stop yourself, you flee into dreamland. Tears streaming, Sophie hammered on Laxmi’s door, Sticks cradled in her arms, and shouted –

“You poisoned my dog!”

A screen appeared, tugging her back to reality, but what she saw was the Quonset hut. Her call had been transferred. Laxmi was there and so was Josh. What was going on?

Josh answered. “No, that was me. Sophie... I’m very sorry about Sticks. You see, Lax and I have both been trying to kill you, for quite a while –”

Everything went black and white. Josh and Lax were together. Cha was there too, lurking in the background, not looking like an internet map anymore. She was cut to the quick. He’d returned to himself, but he’d chosen to join Josh and Laxmi. The screen was frozen, grainy and monochrome. She heard their voices, but couldn’t make out the words. Plain white text wrote subtitles, tagged with their names.

“Lax recovered a while ago, and contacted me,” said Josh. “We thought Medici was a hulk, but we knew they’d be moving heaven and earth to reactivate him. He had to go. But we had to get you out of the way first, because we knew you’d do anything you could think of to stop us. We didn’t want to kill you, Sophie. We had no choice
”

“We agreed I would play dead, and go after you. I’m so sorry. Forgive us,” said Lax. “We were crazy. Don’t worry, your work is safe, I promise.”

The black and white image jumped. Laxmi was suddenly where Josh had been. “I’m trying to contact
il principe
now,” reported Josh, from the depths of the office background. “He’s stirring. Hey, Capo! Hey, Don Medici, sir, most respectfully, I implore you – !”

Cha’s fogeyish chuckle. “Make him an offer he can’t refuse –”

Laxmi peered anxiously close. “Can you still hear us, Sophie?”

There were patches of pixels missing from the image, a swift cancer eating her fields. Bricks, sticks, all gone. Sophie’s house of straw had been blown away, the Big Bad Wolf had found her. Her three friends, in the Quonset hut, whooped and cheered in stop-start, freeze-frame silence. They must have woken Medici.

“What made you change your minds?”

Josh returned, jumpily, to his desk; to the screen. His grainy grey face was broken and pixelated, grinning in triumph; grave and sad.

“It was the blue dot, kiddo. That little blue dot. You gave Lax everything, including the presentation you’d put together for our pal the stranded old alien life-scientist. When we reviewed it, we remembered. We came to our senses... So now I know that I can’t change the truth. I’m a human being, I survived and I have to go home.”

I’m not going to make it, thought Sophie, as she blacked out. But her work was safe.

3

T
HE
A
GENCY HAD
very nearly given up hope. They’d been trying for over a year to regain contact with the Medici probe – the efforts at first full of never-say-die enthusiasm, then gradually tailing off. Just after four in the morning, local time, one year, three months, five days and around fifteen hours after the Medici had vanished from their knowledge, a signal was picked up, by an Agency ground station in Kazakhstan. It was an acknowledgement, responding to a command despatched to the Medici soon after the flare, when they were still hoping for the best. A little late, but confidently, the Medici confirmed that it had exited hibernation mode successfully. This contact was swiftly followed by another signal, reporting that all four Rovers had also survived intact.

“It’s
incredible
,” said an Agency spokesman at the news conference. “Mind-blowing. You can only compare it to someone who’s been in a yearlong coma, close to completely unresponsive, suddenly sitting up in bed and resuming a conversation. We aren’t popping the champagne just yet, but I... I’ll go out on a limb and say the whole Medici Mission is back with us. It was a very emotional occasion, I can tell you. There weren’t many dry eyes –”

Some of the project’s staff had definitively moved on to other things, but the Remote Presence team was still almost intact. Sophie, Cha and Laxmi had in fact been working the simulations in a different lab in the same building, preparing for a more modest, quasi-real-time expedition to an unexplored region of Mars. Josh was in Paris when the news reached him. He’d finished his doctorate during the year of silence; he’d been toying with the idea of taking a desk job at a teaching university and giving up the Rover business. But he dropped everything, and joined the others. Three weeks after Medici rose from the dead, they were let loose on the first packets of RP data – once the upload process, which had developed a few bugs while mothballed, was running smoothly again.

“You still know your drill, guys?” asked Joe Calibri, their new manager. “I hope you can get back up to speed quickly. There’s a lot of stuff to process, you can imagine.”

“It seems like yesterday,” said Cha, the Chinese-American, at just turned thirty the oldest of the team by a couple of years. Stoop-shouldered, distant, with a sneaky, unexpected sense of humour, he made Joe a little nervous. Stocky, muscular little Josh, more like a Jock than an RP jockey, was less of a proposition. Laxmi was the one to watch. Sophie was the most junior and the youngest, a very bright, keen and dedicated kid.

The new manager chuckled uncertainly.

The team all grinned balefully at their new fool, and went to work, donning mitts and helmets. Sophie Renata felt the old familiar tingling, absent from simulation work; the thrilling hesitation and excitement –

The session ended too soon. Coming back to Earth, letting the lab take shape around her, absent thoughts went through her head; about whether she was going to find a new apartment with Lax. About cooking dinner; about other RP projects. The Mars trip, that would be fantastic, but it was going to be very competitive getting onto the team. Asteroid mining surveys: plenty of work there, boring but well paid. What about the surface of Venus project? And had it always been like this, coming out of the Medici? Had she just forgotten the sharp sense of loss; the little tug of inexplicable panic?

She looked around. Cha was gazing dreamily at nothing; Lax frowned at her desktop, as if trying to remember a phone number. Josh was looking right back at Sophie, so sad and strange, as if she’d robbed him of something precious; and she had no idea why.

He shrugged, grinned, and shook his head. The moment passed.

TYCHE AND THE ANTS

Hannu Rajaniemi

T
HE ANTS ARRIVED
on the Moon on the same day Tyche went through the Secret Door to give a ruby to the Magician.

She was glad to be out of the Base. The Brain had given her a Treatment earlier that morning, and that always left her tingly and nervous, with pent-up energy that could only be expended by running down the grey rolling slope down the side of Malapert Mountain, jumping and hooting.

“Come on, keep up!” she shouted at the grag that the Brain had inevitably sent to keep an eye on her. The white-skinned machine followed her on its two thick treads, cylindrical arms swaying for balance as it rumbled laboriously downhill, following the little craters of Tyche’s footprints.

Exasperated, she crossed her arms and paused to wait. She looked up. The mouth of the Base was hidden from view, as it should be, to keep them safe from space sharks. The jagged edge of the mountain hid the Great Wrong Place from sight, except for a single wink of blue malice, just above the gleaming white of the upper slopes, a stark contrast against the velvet black of the sky. The white was not snow – that was a Wrong Place thing – but tiny beads of glass made by ancient meteor impacts. That’s what the Brain said, anyway. According to Chang’e the Moon Girl, it was all the jewels she had lost over the centuries she had lived here.

Tyche preferred Chang’e’s version. That made her think of the ruby, and she touched her belt pouch to make sure it was still there.

“Outings are subject to being escorted at all times,” said the sonorous voice of the Brain in her helmet. “There is no reason to be impatient.”

Most of the grags were autonomous: the Brain could only control a few of them at a time. But of course it would keep an eye on her, so soon after the Treatment.

“Yes, there is, slowpoke,” Tyche muttered, stretching her arms and jumping up and down in frustration.

Her suit flexed and flowed around her with the movement. She had grown it herself as well, the third one so far, although it had taken much longer than the ruby. Its many layers were alive, it felt light, and best of all, it had a powerskin, a slick porous tissue made from cells with mechanosensitive ion channels that translated her movements into power for the suit. It was so much better than the white clumsy fabric ones the Chinese had left behind; the grags had cut and sown a baby-sized version out of those for her that kind of worked but was impossibly stuffy and stiff.

It was the only second time she had tested the new suit, and she was proud of it: it was practically a wearable ecosystem, and she was pretty sure that with its photosynthesis layer, it would keep her alive for months, if she only had enough sunlight and carried enough of the horrible compressed Chinese nutrients.

She frowned. Her legs were suddenly grey, mottled with browns. She brushed them with her hand, and her fingers – slick silvery hue of the powerskin – came away the same colour. It seemed the regolith dust clung to the suit. Annoying. She absently noted to do something about it for the next iteration when she fed the suit back into the Base’s big biofabber.

Now the grag was stuck on the lip of a shallow crater, grinding treads sending up silent parabolas of little rocks and dust. Tyche had had enough of waiting.

“I’ll be back for dinner,” she told the Brain.

Without waiting for the Base mind’s response, she switched off the radio, turned around and started running.

T
YCHE SETTLED INTO
the easy stride the Jade Rabbit had shown her: gliding just above the surface, using well-timed toe-pushes to cross craters and small rocks that littered the uneven regolith.

She took the long way around, avoiding her old tracks that ran down much of the slope, just to confuse the poor grag more. She skirted around the edge of one of the pitch-black cold fingers – deeper craters that never got sunlight – that were everywhere on this side of the mountain. It would have been a shortcut, but it was too cold for her suit. Besides, the ink-men lived in the deep potholes, in the Other Moon beyond the Door.