Existence (87 page)

Of course, everything he was experiencing right now could just be his imagination. The perpetual problem with magic. Still … to be polite … he posed a question in his mind.

I’m not done?

There is more expected of me?

THE LONELY SKY

Lurker Challenge Number Three

If you’ve monitored our TV, radio—and now our Internet—and the reason you haven’t answered is that
you are waiting for us to pass some milestone of development
 … well then, how about a hint?

Pretty please?

*   *   *

If that milestone is for us to assertively
ask
for membership in some society of advanced sapient beings,
please take this paragraph as that asserted step
, taken by one subgroup of humanity, hoping to serve the interests of all our planet.

We are asking. Right now.

Please give us the application forms … and all information (including costs, benefits, and dissenting opinions) that we may need in order to make a well-informed decision.

73.

LURKERS

How much does she realize yet, our little biological wonder?

I can eavesdrop on the conversations with her cybernetic partner. I tap into the data she sends back to her toy ship and listen to her taunting broadcasts. But I cannot probe her mind.

I wonder how much of the picture she sees.

She has only a fraction of the brainpower of Greeter or Awaiter, let alone myself, and a minuscule portion of our knowledge. How weird that sophisticated thought can take place in a tiny container of nearly randomly firing lipid cells, at temperatures that melt water, within a salty adenine soup. Yet, there is the mystique of a Maker in her.

Even I—two thousand generations removed from the touch of organic hands and insulated by my
Purposed Resolve
—even I feel it.

*   *   *

These little challenges that she is rebroadcasting are irksome. As they were when they were first posted on Earth’s data network, ten orbits ago, or eighty of their years.

I recall, we relic-survivors had a crisis, back then. Several of our remnant-members saw Challenge Number Three as satisfying their programmed contact criteria! They wanted to respond right away. Messenger and Inviter had to be purged, to prevent them from shouting “welcome!”

Even so, there was further argument over what to do about some other challenges. Humans were affecting us, before they ventured beyond their moon.

Then came—as I knew it would—their crisis with the crystals. Perhaps the disease would consume them, as happened to so many other promising races, ever since this plague first spread across the galaxy.

Indeed, when the crystals started showing up, didn’t they also drive insanity among
us,
the older, mechanical probes? Especially when some of us decided to team up with certain varieties of newly arrived crystal viruses—our ability to move and use weapons was perverted to help and protect some types …

… which helped to trigger our final war. The last of many.

Now Tor Povlov is stirring those old ashes. Rousing sparks of ancient flame as she and her partner uncover the remnants of a Seeder probe.

THE LONELY SKY

Lurker Challenge Number Three and a Half

This one is a variant on number three. What if you
are
talking at us and we don’t understand?

Looking at other species in our own backyard—we see a lot of communication taking place, and none of it via electromagnetic waves or TCP/IP packets. The ants, bees, cephalopods, dolphins, dogs … they use things like scent trails and dances, body gestures and sonar, antenna waggings and changes in body color. And
most
living things, from bacteria to fungi to termites to bamboo—all the way to cells in our bodies—compete or collaborate with neighbors via
chemicals.

Is it simplistic to think some distant consciousness would arise able to watch
I Love Lucy
? Even if they use encoded electromagnetics, will they decrypt coherent signals encoded in binary? What would your son or daughter make of an analog video tape encoded in PAL or SECAM?

What if we’re being bombarded now by
bent-quantum
messages? Shouted at by civilizations saying “What’s wrong with you guys, are you deaf? Watch out for that Comet/Bomb/Virus/whatever!” Trying so hard to get our attention, putting spots on our sun, sending up giant flares. Or etched the Moon’s surface and gone to the trouble of keeping one face toward us, but we’re too dumb to grasp the simple language of craters.

Oh, but then, isn’t it the job of the more advanced culture to solve communications goofs? Anyway, if this is the right scenario, you can’t read or understand what I say now. So never mind.

74.

A CAUSE LONG LOST

Tor always felt a sneaking sympathy for despised underdogs. Like
grave robbers—
an underappreciated profession, not unrelated to journalism. Both involved bringing the hidden to light.

Those olden-time thieves who pillaged kingly tombs were
recyclers
who put wealth back into circulation. Gold and silver had better uses—like stimulating commerce—than lying buried in some musty superstition vault. Or take archaeologists, unveiling the work of ancient artisans—craftsmen who were far more admirable examples of humanity than the monarchs who employed them.

Tor hadn’t come to the asteroid belt in search of precious metals or museum specimens.
But I’m still part of that grand tradition,
she thought while supervising a swarm of drones, cutting, dismantling, and prying up the remains of prehistoric baby starships, extracting the brain and drive units for shipment in-system, there to be studied by human civilization.

Rest in pieces, you never got to launch across the heavens. But maybe you’ll teach us how to leave the cradle.

Us? Perhaps metal-humans like Gavin would someday venture forth to discover what befell the early builder races.
Unless we give in to temptation … take one of the easy paths. Like renunciation. Or turning inward. Or transforming ourselves into crystal viruses.

Tor glimpsed her partner up at the crater’s rim, directing robots that trimmed and foam-packed all but the most valuable salvaged parts for a long voyage, pulled Earthward by a light-sail freighter. Gavin had asked to work as far as possible from the “creepy stuff”—the musty
habitat zone
down below in the asteroid’s heart, that once held breathable air and liquid water.

“I know we’ve got to explore all that,” he told her. “Just give me some time to get used to the idea.”

How could Tor refuse a reasonable request, made without sarcasm? And so, she quashed her own urgent wish—to drop everything and rush back to those crumbling tunnels, digging around blasted airlocks and collapsed chambers, excavating a secret that lay buried for at least fifty million years.

We may become the most famous grave robbers since Heinrich Schliemann or Howard Carter.
For that, Tor supposed she could wait a bit.

Some of the cutting drones were having a rough time removing a collapsed construction derrick, so Tor hop-floated closer, counting on ape-instincts to swing her prosthetic arms from one twisted girder to another, till at last she reached a good vantage point. The asteroid’s frail gravity tugged her mechanical legs down and around. Tor took hold of the derrick with one of the grippers that served her better than mere feet.

“Drone K, go twelve meters left, then shine your beam down-forty, east-sixty. Drone R, go fifty meters in
that
direction”—she pointed carefully—“and shine down forty-five, west-thirty.”

It took some minutes—using radar, lidar, and stereoscopic imagery—to map out the problem the drones were having, a tangle of wreckage with treasure on the other side. Not only baby probes but apparently a controller unit, responsible for building them! That could be the real prize, buried under a knotted snarl of cables and debris.

Here an organic human brain—evolved in primal thickets—seemed especially handy. Using tricks of parallel image processing that went back to the Eocene, Tor picked out a passage of least resistance, faster than the
Warren Kimbel
’s mainframe could.

“Take this route…” She click-mapped for the drones. “Start cutting here … and here … and—”

A sharp glare filled the cavity,
spilling hard-edge shadows away from every metal strut.
Pain
flared and Tor cringed as her faceplate belatedly darkened. Organic eyes might have been blinded. Even her cyborg implants had trouble compensating.

The corner of her percept flared a diagnosis that sent chills racing down her spine. Coherent monochromatic reflections. A high-powered laser.

A laser? Who the hell is firing…?

Suppressing fear, her first thought was a cutter-drone malfunctioning. She started to utter the general shut-down command, when the
war alarm
blared instead!

A weapon, then,
commented some calm corner of her mind.

As quickly as it struck, the brilliant light vanished, leaving her in almost-pitch blackness, with just the distant sun illuminating the exposed crater rim.

“Gavin!” she started to shout. “Watch out for—”

A sharp vocal cry interrupted.

“Tor! I’m under
attack.
”

Dry mouth, she swallowed hard.

“Gavin … give specifics!”

Her racing heart was original equipment. Human-organic 1.0, pounding like a stampede. Even faster when her partner replied.

“I … I’m in a crevice—a slit in the rock. What’s left of me. Tor, they sliced off my arm!”

They?
She wanted to scream.
Who—or what—is “they”?

Instead of shrill panic squeaks, Tor somehow managed to sound like a commander.

“Are your seals intact? Your core—” Crouching where there had been a stark shadow moments ago, she prayed the girder still lay between her body and the shooter.

“Fine, but it
smarts
! And the arm flew away. Even if I make it out of here, my spare
sucks.
It’ll take weeks to grow a new—”

“Never mind that!” Tor interrupted to stop Gavin from babbling. Get him focused. “Have you got a direction? Can your drones do a pinpoint?”

“Negative. Three of them are chopped to bits. I sent the rest to cover. Maybe
Warren—
”

Cripes. That reminded Tor. If a foe had taken out the ship …

“
Warren Kimbel,
status!”

There followed a long, agonizing pause—maybe three seconds—while Tor imagined a collapse of all luck or hope.

Then came the voice she needed to hear.

“I am undamaged, Captain Povlov. I was blocked from direct line to the aggressor by the asteroid’s bulk. I am now withdrawing all sensitive arrays, radiators, and service drones, except the one that’s relaying this signal. It is using a pop-out antenna.”

“Good! Initiate war-danger protocols.”

“Protocols engaged. Tracking and weapons coming online. I am plotting a course to come get both of you.”

Tor would have bitten her lower lip, if she still had one, making a hard choice.

“Better not move, just yet. That beam was damn powerful. Gavin and I are safe for now—”

“Hey, speak for yourself!” her young partner interrupted. “You wouldn’t say that if an organo-boy had his arm chopped off!”

“—but we’ll be screwed if any harm comes to the ship.”

That shut Gavin’s mouth. Good. His position was worse than hers. He shouldn’t radiate any more than he had to.

“
Warren,
did you get drone telemetry to analyze the beam?”

“Enough for preliminary appraisal, Captain. From the kill-wattage, duration, and color, I give eighty-five percent probability that we were attacked by a FACR.”

“Shit!”

Across the broad asteroid belt, littered with broken wreckage of long-ago alien machines, only one kind was known to still be active.
Faction-Allied Competition Removers
—an awkward name, but the acronym stuck, because it was easily mispronounced into a curse.

A couple of decades ago, less than a year after Gerald Livingstone recovered the first of the space-fomites, there had come the Night of the Lasers, when observers on Earth stared skyward in amazement, watching the distant sky crisscross with deadly beams. That same day, all over the Earth, hundreds of buried crystals detonated bits of themselves, in order to draw attention and perhaps get themselves dug up. All this desperation happened just after world media carried the Havana Artifact’s formal sales pitch, offering humanity its deal for a certain kind of immortality.

Why did all of that occur on the same fateful day? It took some time to put all the pieces together and grasp what happened—the reason why that broadcast had such violent effects.
And apparently it’s not over.

“
Warren
,” she said. “Maybe it’s no coincidence that we were attacked just after you orbited behind the rock.”

There was no immediate response, as the ship’s mind pondered this possibility. Tor couldn’t help feeling the brief, modern satisfaction that came from thinking of something quicker than an ai did.

“If I grasp your point, Captain, you are suggesting that the FACR is afraid of me. More afraid than I should be, of him?”

“That could explain why it waited till you were out of sight, before shooting at Gavin and me. If it figures you’re too strong to challenge … well, maybe you can come get us, after all.”

“Amen,” murmured Gavin. Then, before Tor could admonish, he lapsed back into radio silence.

“Unless it was the machine’s intent to lure us into drawing exactly that conclusion,”
the ship-brain mused.
“And there may be another reason for me to remain where I am, for now.”

A soft click informed Tor that
Warren
was switching to strong encryption.