Spin (45 page)

But who needed or wanted longevity? The end of the world was closer every day.

The flickers were evidence of that, if anyone needed proof.

The first positive results from the replicator project had been in for half a year when the flickers began.

I heard most of the replicator news from Jase a couple of days before it broke in the media. In itself, it was nothing spectacular. A NASA/Perihelion survey satellite had recorded a faint signal from a known Oort Cloud body well beyond the orbit of Pluto—a periodic uncoded blip that was the sound of a replicator colony nearing completion. (Nearing maturity, you might say.) Which appears trivial unless you consider what it means: The dormant cells of an utterly novel, man-made biology had alighted on a chunk of dusty ice in deepest space. Those cells had then begun an agonizingly slow form of metabolism, in which they absorbed the scant heat of the distant sun, used it to separate a few nearby molecules of water and carbon, and duplicated themselves with the resulting raw materials.

Over the course of many years the same colony grew to, perhaps, the size of a ball bearing. An astronaut who had made the impossibly long journey and knew precisely where to look would have seen it as a black dimple on the rocky/icy regolith of the host planetesimal. But the colony was fractionally more efficient than its single-celled ancestor. It began to grow more quickly and generate more heat. The temperature differential between the colony and its surroundings was only a fraction of a degree Kelvin (except when brief reproductive bursts pumped latent energy into the local environment), but it was persistent.

More millennia (or terrestrial months) passed. Subroutines in the replicators’ genetic substrate, activated by local heat gradients, modified the colony’s growth. Cells began to differentiate. Like a human embryo, the colony produced not merely more cells but specialized cells, the equivalent of heart and lungs, arms and legs. Tendrils of it forced themselves into the loose material of the planetesimal, mining it for carbonaceous molecules.

Eventually, microscopic but carefully calculated vapor bursts began to slow the host object’s rotation (patiently, over centuries), until the colony’s face was turned perpetually to the sun. Now differentiation began in earnest. The colony extruded carbon/carbon and carbon/silicon junctions; it grew monomolecular whiskers to join these junctions together, bootstrapping itself up the ladder of complexity; from these junctions it generated light-sensitive dots—eyes—and the capacity to generate and process microbursts of radio-frequency noise.

And as more centuries passed the colony elaborated and refined these capabilities until it announced itself with a simple periodic chirp, the equivalent of the sound a newborn sparrow might make. Which was what our satellite had detected.

The news media ran the story for a couple of days (with stock footage of Wun Ngo Wen, his funeral, the launch) and then forgot about it. After all, this was only the first stage of what the replicators were designed to do.

Merely mat. Uninspiring. Unless you thought about it for more man thirty seconds.

This was technology with, literally, a life of its own. A genie out of the bottle for good and all.

The flicker happened a few months later.

The flicker was the first sign of a change or disturbance in the Spin membrane—first, that is, unless you count the event that followed the Chinese missile attack on the polar artifacts, back in the earliest years of the Spin. Both events were visible from every point on the globe. But beyond that key resemblance they were not much alike.

After the missile attack the Spin membrane had seemed to stutter and recover, generating strobed images of the evolving sky, multiple moons and gyrating stars.

The flicker was different.

I watched it from the balcony of my suburban apartment. A warm September night. Some of the neighbors had already been outside when the flicker started. Now all of us were. We perched on our ledges like starlings, chattering.

The sky was bright.

Not with stars but with infinitesimally narrow threads of golden fire, crackling like heatless lightning from horizon to horizon. The threads moved and shifted erratically; some flickered or faded altogether; occasionally new ones flared into existence. It was as mesmerizing as it was frightening.

The event was global, not local. On the daylight side of the planet the phenomenon was only slightly visible, lost in sunlight or obscured by cloud; in North and South America and western Europe the dark-sky displays caused sporadic outbreaks of panic. After all, we’d been expecting the end of the world for more years than most of us cared to count. This looked like an overture, at least, to the real thing.

There were hundreds of successful or attempted suicides that night, plus scores of murders or mercy killings, in the city where I lived. Worldwide, the numbers were incalculably larger. Apparently there were plenty of people like Molly Seagram, people who chose to dodge the much-predicted boiling of the seas with a few lethal tablets of this or that. And spares for family and friends. Many of them opted for the final exit as soon as the sky lit up. Prematurely, as it turned out.

The display lasted eight hours. By morning I was at the local hospital lending a hand in the emergency ward. By noon I had seen seven separate cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, folks who had intentionally locked themselves in the garage with an idling car. Most were dead well before I pronounced them and the survivors were hardly better off. Otherwise healthy people, people I might have passed at the grocery store, would be spending the rest of their lives hooked up to ventilators, irreparably brain damaged, victims of a botched exit strategy. Not pleasant. But the gunshot wounds to the head were worse. I couldn’t treat them without thinking of Wun Ngo Wen lying on that Florida highway, blood gouting from what remained of his skull.

Eight hours. Then the sky was blank again, the sun beaming out of it like the punchline to a bad joke.

It happened again a year and a half later.

“You look like a man who lost his faith,” Hakkim once told me.

“Or never had one,” I said.

“I don’t mean faith in God. Of that you seem to be genuinely innocent. Faith in something else. I don’t know what.”

Which seemed cryptic. But I understood it a little more clearly the next time I talked to Jason.

He called me at home. (On my regular cell, not the orphan phone I carried with me like a luckless charm.) I said, “Hello?” and he said, “You must be watching this on television.”

“Watching what?”

“Turn on one of the news networks. Are you alone?”

The answer was yes. By choice. No Molly Seagram to complicate the end of days. The TV remote was on the coffee table where I’d left it. Where I always left it.

The news channel showed a graph of many colors accompanied by a droning voice-over. I muted it. “What am I looking at, Jase?”

“A JPL press conference. The data set retrieved from the last orbital receiver.”

Replicator data, in other words. “And?”

“We’re in business,” he said. I could practically hear his smile.

The satellite had detected multiple radio sources narrow-casting from the outer solar system. Which meant that more than one replicator colony had grown to maturity. And the data were complex, Jason said, not simple. As the replicator colonies aged, their growth rate slowed but their functions became more refined and purposeful. They weren’t just leaning sunward for free energy anymore. They were analyzing starlight, calculating planetary orbits on neural networks made of silicon and carbon fibers, comparing them to templates etched into their genetic code. No less than a dozen fully adult colonies had sent back precisely the data they were designed to collect, four streams of binary data declaring:

1. This was a planetary system of a star with a solar mass of 1.0;

2. The system possessed eight large planetary bodies (Pluto falling under the detectable mass limit);

3. Two of those planets were optically blank, surrounded by Spin membranes; and

4. The reporting replicator colonies had shifted into reproductive mode, shedding nonspecific seed cells and launching them on bursts of cometary vapor toward neighboring stars.

The same message, Jase said, had been beamed at local, less mature colonies, which would respond by bypassing redundant functions and directing their energy into purely reproductive behavior.

In other words, we had successfully infected the outer system with Wun’s quasi-biological systems.

Which were now sporulating.

I said, “This tells us nothing about the Spin.”

“Of course not. Not yet. But this little trickle of information will be a torrent before long. In time we’ll be able to put together a Spin map of all the nearby stars—maybe eventually the entire galaxy. From that we ought to be able to deduce where the Hypotheticals come from, where they’ve been Spinning, and what ultimately happens to Spin worlds when their stars expand and burn out.”

“That won’t fix anything, though, will it?”

He sighed as if I’d disappointed him by asking a stupid question. “Probably not. But isn’t it better to know than to speculate? We might find out we’re doomed, but we might find out we have more time left than we expected. Remember, Tyler, we’re working on other fronts, too. We’ve been delving into the theoretical physics in Wun’s archives. If you model the Spin membrane as a wormhole enclosing an object accelerating at near-light-speed—”

“But we’re not accelerating. We’re not going anywhere.” Except headlong into the future.

“No, but if you do the calculation it yields results that match our observation of the Spin. Which might give us a clue as to which
forces
the Hypotheticals are manipulating.”

“To what end, though, Jase?”

“Too soon to say. But I don’t believe in the futility of knowledge.”

“Even if we’re dying?”

“Everyone dies.”

“I mean, as a species.”

“That remains to be seen. Whatever the Spin is, it has to be more than a sort of elaborate global euthanasia. The Hypotheticals must be acting with a purpose.”

Maybe so. But this, I realized, was the faith that had deserted me. The faith in Big Salvation.

All the brands and flavors of Big Salvation. At the last minute we would devise a technological fix and save ourselves. Or: the Hypotheticals were benevolent beings who would turn the planet into a peaceable kingdom. Or: God would rescue us all, or at least the true believers among us. Or. Or. Or.

Big Salvation. It was a honeyed lie. A paper lifeboat, even if we were killing ourselves trying to cling to it. It wasn’t the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation.

The flicker came back the following winter, persisted for forty-four hours, then vanished again. Many of us began to think of it as a kind of celestial weather, unpredictable but generally harmless.

Pessimists pointed out that the intervals between episodes were growing shorter, the duration of the episodes growing longer.

In April there was a flicker that lasted three days and interfered with the transmission of aerostat signals. This one provoked another (smaller) wave of successful and attempted suicides—people driven to panic less by what they saw in the sky than by the failure of their telephones and TV sets.

I had stopped paying attention to the news, but certain events were impossible to ignore: the military setbacks in North Africa and eastern Europe, the cult coup in Zimbabwe, the mass suicides in Korea. Exponents of apocalyptic Islam scored big numbers in the Algerian and Egyptian elections that year. A Filipino cult that worshipped the memory of Wun Ngo Wen—whom they had reconceived as a pastoralist saint, an agrarian Gandhi—had successfully engineered a general strike in Manila.

And I got a few more calls from Jason. He mailed me a phone with some kind of built-in encryption pad, which he claimed would give us “pretty good protection against keyword hunters,” whatever that meant.

“Sounds a little paranoid,” I said.

“Usefully paranoid, I think.”

Perhaps, if we wanted to discuss matters of national security. We didn’t, though, at least not at first. Instead Jason asked me about my work, my life, the music I’d been listening to. I understood that he was trying to generate the kind of conversation we might have had twenty or thirty years ago— before Perihelion, if not before the Spin. He had been to see his mother, he told me. Carol was still counting out her days by clock and bottle. Nothing had changed. Carol had insisted on that. The house staff kept everything clean, everything in its place. The Big House was like a time capsule, he said, as if it had been hermetically sealed on the first night of the Spin. It was a little spooky that way.

I asked whether Diane ever called.

“Diane stopped talking to Carol back before Wun was killed. No, not a word from her.”

Then I asked him about the replicator project. There hadn’t been anything in the papers lately.

“Don’t bother looking. JPL is sitting on the results.”

I heard the unhappiness in his voice. “That bad?”

“It’s not entirely bad news. At least not until recently. The replicators did everything Wun hoped they would. Amazing things, Tyler. I mean absolutely amazing. I wish I could show you the maps we generated. Big navigable software maps. Almost two hundred thousand stars, in a halo of space hundreds of light-years in diameter. We know more about stellar and planetary evolution now than an astronomer of E.D.‘s generation could have imagined.”

“But nothing about the Spin?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“So what did you learn?”

“For one thing, we’re not alone. In that volume of space we’ve found three optically blank planets roughly the size of the Earth, in orbits that are habitable by terrestrial standards or would have been in the past. The nearest is circling the star Ursa Majoris 47. The farthest—”

“I don’t need the details.”