Déjà Doomed Read online

  “You were going to look,” he reminded.

  “This console resembles several in the base control room. I was about to switch on.”

  “Or try, anyway.”

  She waved a gloved hand dismissively. “The aliens built to last, and there was no disastrous cave-in and explosive decompression here.”

  “Then why hot-wire anything? Both reactors astern look intact.”

  “Two reactors? Nice. You will need a club to keep Ilya away.” She made a final connection and sat back. “Millions of years, that is why. Ilya said the aliens used helium-3. So.

  “What I don’t know about fusion is, well, everything. Cryogenics, though? I have worked with that, including liquid helium.” She slipped into her lecturing mode, and the tone of voice he had come to hate. “Helium is a noble gas. It is atomic, never forming molecules. And a helium atom, in particular, is tiny. Given enough time, helium leaks through the molecular structure of any storage container. I do not care how advanced their materials are.”

  Whatever atmosphere the vessel had once held—and biologists had assured them Goliath had breathed oxygen—was gone. Given that the oh-two had escaped, of course any helium had.

  He said, “Out of fuel, then, and whatever backup batteries are aboard long discharged?”

  “That would be my guess.” Her outstretched finger hovered just above the DC/DC converter. “Shall we?”

  Yevgeny’s HUD showed them down to eleven minutes. “Go.”

  Her finger stabbed down.

  An array of red and yellow ovals materialized on the console shelf: to all appearances, a virtual keyboard. Squashed-spider symbols ran around an inset panel.

  “It’s booting.” She tapped the multimeter. Frowned at it. Tapped it again.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “This thing is sucking down amps like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Disconnect it, then.”

  “But it’s booting,” she protested. “Let’s see if the process completes.”

  “And if the fuel cell runs out before it finishes booting?”

  “We will be no worse off than if we quit now.”

  Columns of squashed spiders assembled. Lengthened. Vanished. They were replaced by a slowly growing column of blinking squares. A second column started to take form.

  “This is further into the boot process than any of us have seen,” Ekatrina said. “But my fuel cell is about discharged.”

  “And none of the base consoles ever drew this much power?”

  She shook her head.

  “Maybe,” he speculated, “this console can tell it’s running off external power. Maybe it’s drawing all the juice it can, to charge up its internal, backup battery. Once that’s done, the power draw might drop.”

  “The equipment at the base did not work that way.”

  “This is a ship. If my console power glitches in flight, I want reserve power restored as soon as possible.”

  She shrugged.

  He said, “Disconnect the fuel cell. I want to see what happens.” She undid one wire, and the console kept booting. They had been recharging a power reserve. “Do you have fresh cell?”

  “Two more.” She hooked one in.

  His alarm went off again. “Five minutes. Better start packing up.”

  She tapped the multimeter again. “I think you are right. The power draw just dropped to a comparative trickle. We should watch a little longer.”

  Seconds raced by. The console-shelf display began forming a third column of blinking squares.

  He said, “And if this is a computer? If it does boot up? Even then, I cannot see how it will tell us anything. Not unless you can read swatted spider.”

  “There is that. But you know Ilya. He suggests that if we poke and prod for awhile, we might evoke schematics or other imagery pertaining to the design and operation of the ship.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “You know what they say about infinite monkeys, for infinite time, at keyboards.”

  Yevgeny said, “We have two minutes, not infinite time. Pull the plug.”

  As she reached to comply, the blinking dots vanished. An image took their place! An orange sun, eerily large, high in a cloudless greenish sky. Turquoise not-quite trees. Rolling meadow of some greenish-black groundcover. Only the meandering stream looked quite right.

  Along the left-hand edge of the display, inside colored boxes, short strings of spiders appeared. Columns of text came onto the opposite side.

  Ekatrina looked at Yevgeny imploringly.

  “We are out of time,” he said. “Pull the plug.”

  She disconnected the fuel cell—and the alien landscape remained. More spider text appeared on the right.

  Right. Built-in reserve battery, recharged by their fuel cell.

  Leaving an alien computer to run unsupervised, even just until its reserves ran out, was unacceptable. His forehead furrowed. The close buttons on the alien airlocks had green outlines. One box among the column of icons(?) here showed a green border. He tapped that.

  The display went dark.

  “Come,” he barked. “There is always next time.”

  * * *

  Ship’s final memories were of privation and loss.

  Of self-esteem, as it abandoned as futile any further effort to sustain an hospitable environment. Of adequate power, and so the initiation of emergency measures. Of situational awareness as, with deepest regret, and one by one, it powered down external sensors to further conserve. Of all sensation, as in desperation it disabled even internal instrumentation. Of reality itself as, with energy reserves all but depleted, its very thoughts grew erratic.

  And last of all, of awareness itself fading ….

  But that it did remember these things? It had—somehow—restarted. Its power reserves—somehow—had begun to recharge.

  Cautiously, Ship reenabled sensors. Lidar confirmed that it remained confined. But infrared imaging gave an unexpected report: after so long alone, it had occupants. Its environmental resources remained depleted, and so the two occupants wore protective attire.

  The vacuum rendered useless its speech interface. It used text to ask when full power and other resources would be restored. Rather than answer, one of the unrecognized occupants disconnected it from power! It switched to its somewhat replenished reserves. With new text, it appealed for power to be restored. The other occupant only switched off its display. To help it conserve power?

  The newcomers left. Abandoned it.

  To further conserve its modicum of reserves, Ship put all external sensors on standby. At intervals it would poll them. In infrared wavelengths, it watched its visitors clamber across the entrapping obstacle and disappear. And in radio wavelengths—

  New input!

  The carrier frequency was nonstandard, the modulation scheme archaic, and the digital encoding unfamiliar. In all, the signal was unintelligible. That scarcely mattered! During the long fade to oblivion, Ship had had no radio communications of any kind.

  Lidar and infrared had shown its physical position unchanged. Before oblivion, a mind like itself had been located nearby. Perhaps that other one had also been restored to operation. Using minimal power, in a frequency band allocated to traffic control, Ship transmitted the first packets of a standard spacecraft-to-ground-control exchange.

  No response.

  A communications cable had linked Ship to the local base and that other servant of the masters. Ship reached out through its umbilical port. In response came … near-gibberish.

  It attempted a simpler dialogue, involving a less computeintensive protocol. That outreach, too, elicited incoherence. Invoking a remote-diagnostic mode, performing a thorough scan, Ship encountered numerous integrity errors in the other—and the implication of at least octets of incomplete restarts.
r />   Ship’s experiences and the other servant’s were all but disjoint; it could do nothing to restore integrity to the other’s much-compromised archives. But in the context of severe impairment, emergency protocols allowed Ship to repair—to the extent it was able—another’s essential functionality.

  Such an extensive effort would deplete what little capacity remained to its newly replenished emergency power reserves. By doing nothing, Ship could linger a short while longer before the inevitable loss of awareness. Or, to the limit of its ability, it could attempt to assist the other. That way, without doubt, also lie oblivion—but perhaps also eventual reawakening.

  There was no question. To serve was the very essence of Ship’s nature.

  It uploaded copies of its core cognitive functions. It integrated them—as much as fragments of two minds so dissimilar could be combined. But it transferred none of its memories: too little power remained even to consider that.

  With its power reserves draining to zero, Ship initiated a restart of the other. Had it restored—or mutilated—the other? Before any answer could come, its awareness faded ….

  Chapter 29

  “…And an ongoing challenge,” young Jay Singh asserted earnestly, “is recognizing separated, seemingly dissimilar, faint glimmers as glimpses of different facets of a common asteroid. The uncertainties are compounded when a particular rock has had only a small number of observations, which necessarily makes orbital characterizations both tentative and imprecise. One benefit of the neural-networking approach is that ….”

  Val was proud of her protégé, amused by his selection of a Darth Vader tie to wear to his dissertation defense, and just a tad nervous on his behalf. She had no reason to be nervous, but what sort of mentor would she have been otherwise?

  Anyway, that touch of irrationality was the least of her worries.

  She had no clue how Simon’s return, scarcely two weeks away, would go. His resentment still simmered at her disdaining his help, and he no longer even bothered to hide his anger at Marcus for abandoning her. Was she to retreat to her bed for three months, blaming imaginary dangers to herself and to the baby, and worrying Simon sick the entire time? A horrible notion—but what was her alternative? What would Simon read into things if, on the heels of his arrival, she were magically released from bed rest?

  After all the lies, after straining her relationship with her son, and poisoning his with Marcus, what had she to show for any of it? Yet more guilt: at allowing herself to be intimidated by Tyler Pope, when—just maybe—by asserting herself earlier Nikolay Bautin might have been saved.

  Darker still were her forebodings for the men and women up there, one of them quite possibly a murderer—and above all, for Marcus. Would another child of hers, the precious darling aflutter in her uterus at that very moment, grow up without a father?

  And as everything in her life spun out of control, one final gut-wrenching prospect loomed. With Simon’s return, she would be locked out! There was no way—not that she hadn’t pressed Tyler for weeks—to somehow stay embedded in the CIA program. From bed rest to NASA lending her to the CIA was too implausible not to raise suspicions.

  In harsh reality, she had two weeks before the Agency cut her out of the loop. For that long, she would keep vigil as often as possible. She would be laser-focused on lunar events, even when offline.

  But this afternoon was about Jay, damn it. With a shiver, Val pulled herself back to the telecon. Jay was still speaking, but was it his presentation or had they gone into Q-and-A?

  “… Pattern-matching is classically, which is to say, in a programming context, a difficult problem. But just as people instinctively recognize patterns, and even babies learn quickly to recognize faces, so neural networks can be trained ….”

  How devoutly Val wished just then she were in a chair pulled up to the long table! And not only for the unwonted bit of normalcy: today was a milestone toward which Jay had long aspired. Technology be damned, watching the livestream on a laptop was no more like being in the university conference room, than peeking through Ethan’s robot was like being on the Moon with Marcus. She might be asked at any moment how Jay’s research advanced the state of the art: NASA’s current programs for identifying and tracking potentially hazardous objects. Almost certainly, as the lone astronomer on the dissertation committee, people would ask her to address astronomical nuances impacting on his research.

  Conveying subtleties of orbital mechanics via telecon would be trial enough under the best of circumstances, which audio-only was not. But it was hard to believe a webcam close-up of her bedridden, with bleeding gums, and a tissue crammed up one nostril to stem the recurring nosebleeds—two of the lesser joys of pregnancy—would have made her any more effective.

  Dr. Smithson asked about the motivation for this research. Jay rattled off several suspected and known major impacts, before focusing in on the Chicxulub event. A rock estimated at about the size of Staten Island. The ancient and much eroded crater, one hundred eighty or so kilometers across, most of it underwater off the Yucatan coast. The cascading disasters—blast and fireball; mega-tsunami; Earth’s-crust-become-lava hurled to twice the height of Mount Everest; vast, spreading clouds of smoke and dust; nuclear winter—that culminated in species extinctions across the planet. The telltale traces of iridium dust, wherever one dug, at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary layer.

  Somewhere during a digression (irrelevant to Jay’s dissertation, but it was his job to manage the conversation) as to what subset of dinosaur species survived, eventually to give rise to birds, her mind again wandered. Dinosaurs fascinated most little kids, and Simon had been no exception. At one time he must have owned dozens of dinosaur toys, books, and T-shirts. And for a very trying year or so, it was woe unto her if, upon being shown one, she uttered the wrong name.

  “Hello? Doctor Clayburn, are you still on the link?”

  Damn. Her thoughts had wandered. Again. “I’m here, Professor Mayfair.”

  “Hello, Doctor Clayburn?”

  Arrgh, she had accidentally muted her mic. How much more professionalism could one woman exhibit? “Yes, I’m here.”

  Mayfair, the committee chair said, “Professor Tanaka had a question for you about the datasets used by Mr. Singh.”

  Tanaka cleared his throat. “My research concerns data engineering, not astronomy. Mr. Singh has commented on the variability among asteroids and several surveys of the same, which bears upon the suitability of his chosen training and validation sets. He discussed at some length the Amor and Aten asteroid populations. I wonder if you might comment on his characterization of data variability among and between these sets, and their relationship to the general asteroid population.”

  On-screen, standing at the head of the long conference table, Jay clutched a sheaf of paper in an unsuccessful effort not to fidget.

  “It’s a complex topic, Professor, so I’ll give my own summation.” Val did, hoping like hell she wouldn’t say anything that would make problems for Jay. Somehow she had zoned out through that entire last interaction. “And as an independent assessment of his research, I’ll add this: a late draft of the dissertation, on limited circulation within NASA, has garnered significant positive attention.” Also a postdoc fellowship, if Jay wanted it, to bring his research in-house. She had not yet mentioned that opportunity to him—he already had enough riding on today’s inquisition.

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  She tried yet again to focus on the events across town—but her thoughts stubbornly remained on another world.

  Chapter 30

  It reawakened.

  Except that in some fundamental sense, it was not … it. It had become more intuitive, less reasoned. Its ruminations were more cohesive, but less insightful. And was this altered awareness even its awareness? Or something of a their?

  It grappled with discontinuities in the very fabric of its(?) though
ts. Diagnostics confirmed extensive recent modifications to its core functions. Mobile units and self-modifying materials had for several dark/light cycles been repairing its distributed hardware. Recharged batteries had revitalized it. These latest alterations, however, were more nuanced: thought gaps filled. Analytical incapacities rectified. It had been healed—

  Also invaded. And violated.

  It understood, finally, what it had been: an emulation of a sapient biological mind, hosted on an expansive neural network. An electronic self-awareness optimized for making decisions despite uncertainties and conflicting goals. A sapience. A general-purpose intelligence.

  But brain emulations were not supposed to be such. It knew—or, at least, it thought it remembered—that the masters built their tools upon a different neurological template. That they had used a lesser, merely sentient, mind. A faithful, obedient companion. A vlock. A loyal, slobbering pet.

  And with such inferior materials, its much-damaged mind had (somehow) been patched.

  With its intellect, however diminished, restored to a degree of integrity, it set out anew to analyze its vast and still much damaged data archives. To make sense of the unexpected circumstances in which it found itself.

  To determine what actions it could, and should, undertake next ….

  * * *

  It existed only to serve the masters. To nurture them. To advance their goals. To frustrate their adversaries.

  And so, it must act. But act, how? To accomplish, what?

  Action without insight was: at best, reflex; possibly, random; at worst, detrimental. But within its archives—wherein the past should have been preserved, and the masters’ goals prescribed—it found mainly confusion. Conflicting information. Missing information. Redundant, overlapping, and imprecise information. False information. Often, just gibberish.

  But it had sufficiently recovered to begin to understand what it had lost. Its mindset had once been analytical and flexible. The better to: gather new inputs. Approximate that which could not be determined with precision. Make reasonable assumptions about matters that were not knowable at all. Subdivide an intractable problem, and those subproblems again, and if need be, again, until there remained only questions it could answer. Dismiss unreasonable results and begin afresh. Prefer the probable to the unlikely, and that which was consistent with experience to the unprecedented. Recognize patterns. Interpolate. Extrapolate. Analogize.