Echoes of Earth (30 page)

It’s a hard life,
she silently told the engram of Peter Alander, feeling the pity she hoped she would show one of her own.
But I’m sure you already know that.

2.1.5

“Are you sure we’re not being monitored here?” he asked
as he stopped on the balcony before Caryl Hatzis. He tried to ignore the spinning of the sky above him as the tear-shaped habitat revolved. The carpet was soft beneath his feet, the air slightly more humid than the interior of the hole ship, and there was a faint smell of frangipani. It was almost as though he were standing somewhere in the tropics, rather than in a bubble clinging midway along one stem of the largest artifact he had ever seen—the thing Hatzis had referred to as the Frame.

Still, it did give him a strange feeling of returning. He was home, more or less. At least, he assumed this was where the majority of the remaining humans lived, in physical form. There were no other pressurized habitats to be found in the system, unless they were either expertly camouflaged or buried underground, which made sense in engineering terms.

“As sure as we can be,” Caryl Hatzis said, stepping forward to take his hand. She wore an elegant gown of dark purple velvet with her hair tied back in a bun. Her skin was flawless and soft to the touch. Her face and throat were unadorned, but around one wrist she wore a simple silver band. It was the only decoration he could see.

She was like something out of an old immersion soap: almost too perfect to be real. And maybe she wasn’t, he thought. He had no way of knowing if this really was Caryl Hatzis.

“I hope you’ll forgive my paranoia,” he said, feeling conspicuously underdressed beside her. He let her guide him away from the balustrade and over to a wrought-iron setting consisting of two chairs and a table, on which a couple of glasses and a jug of ice water rested. He could see drops of condensation trickling down the jug’s curved belly as he sat down heavily. The centrifugal gravity was almost Earth-normal. “UNESSPRO regs specifically instructed us to communicate anything important to no one but those in authority. I guess they were worried about sensitive information getting out—”

“You don’t have to worry about that anymore,” she said firmly.

“How can you say that without knowing what I’m going to tell you? For all you know, it could have serious destabilizing effects on your society.”

“Nothing you can tell us will be worse than anything we’ve been through in the past.”

He regarded her suspiciously. “This Vincula thing,” he said. “It’s not some sort of group mind, is it?”

She smiled and eased herself into a chair. “Far from it, Peter. It’s simply very flexible. It can cope with change.”

“Can it cope with the existence of intelligent alien life?” He asked the question on an impulse, hoping for a reaction. Her response was altogether too smug.

“It has in the past,” she said evenly, “and continues to. Not long after the Spike, when some sort of coordination was returning to the system, a series of brief transmissions were recorded from a number of distant sources in the direction of Sculptor.”

He frowned. “What sort of transmissions?”

“You weren’t aware of them? I’m surprised. Upsilon Aquarius is in roughly the same direction as the transmissions. Perhaps your detectors were concentrating on Earth at the time. Had they been facing the other way, I’m sure you would have noticed.” She shrugged. “The transmissions didn’t come from survey teams, if that’s what you’re wondering. Not human ones, anyway. That they were of intelligent origin cannot be doubted, even though they ceased abruptly a year later, never to recur. To this day, they remain untranslated.” Her chin lifted slightly. “Their existence conclusively put your original’s theory to rest, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t care about
that
,” he said, although part of him was still irked by the fact. “If anything, I’m actually relieved. If you didn’t believe in the possibility of life elsewhere, then you would have had much more difficulty accepting what I have to tell you.”

“That your ship is of alien origin?” she asked blandly. “As well as the membrane coating your body?”

“And more,” he said.

“We already guessed as much, Peter. And the Vincula
is
coping with the confirmation of that suspicion, in case you are still wondering.” Her smile returned. “We would like access to the data you have brought. Your discovery promises to be one of the more... interesting in human history.”

“Interesting?” He felt that she was she trying to downplay the importance of the find. But if so, why? “I hope it will be much more than that. This ship and others like it could reunite Earth with the survey worlds. I can travel from here to Adrasteia in less than—”

“To where?”

“Adrasteia. That’s the name we gave the proposed colony world we found. It took me less than a day in real time to get from there to here. And I have the ability to communicate with the
Tipler
instantly. Access to this sort of technology will radically alter the way human society operates, much as the wireless radio or the Internet did in the past.”

She nodded. “We detected your transmissions in our own prototype communicator. At first we thought it was just noise—we called the first one the Discord—but gradually we realized that it was more than that. You called Upsilon Aquarius on several occasions, the first four days ago; is that correct?”

“No. The first few transmissions must’ve been the test we performed, when we tried to contact Earth from Upsilon Aquarius. Not long after, we tested it again, using the hole ship. The most recent transmissions took place when I arrived yesterday, looking for instructions.” He was glad to tell her something she hadn’t already guessed, even if it was just a minor detail. The conversation wasn’t going at all as he had expected; he had clearly underestimated the capabilities of the Vincula and its... What could he call them?
Components
, perhaps? “But are you telling me that you’re close to having this sort of technology anyway?”

“I can’t answer that, Peter, without knowing more about the technology you have access to. Looking at your ship doesn’t tell me anything.”

“I guess not.” He sagged back into the seat, wishing he could trust them. At the moment, though, he didn’t feel confident enough even to drink the water offered to him. “Look, I’m sorry. I must seem like some primitive yokel to you, blustering on about stuff you already know more about than I do.”

Her expression didn’t change. “Not at all, Peter.”

“It’s just that I want you to realize that I’m not treating this lightly—and to make sure that you won’t, either. This is the real thing, Caryl.” He leaned forward again. “This is
why
we went out there in the first place.”

“I didn’t go anywhere, Peter.”

“I know, I know.
You
didn’t, but versions of you did.” He experienced a brief flashback to his last conversation with Lucia:
If not for us, then for whom?
“But you, the old you from a century ago, would have gone if she’d had the chance, just like my original would have. This is what we were all looking for,
hoping
for.”

She was shaking her head. “You’re wrong, Peter. I wouldn’t have gone. I wanted to stay here. Why else would I agree to the entrainment process? My engrams could go instead. That was what they were for. They were—”

She stopped, and he felt his face screw up into a quizzical expression.
Not go?
Who in their right mind wouldn’t have jumped at the chance?

“We seem to have drifted off topic,” she said, shifting on her seat. For the first time in the conversation, she seemed to be something more than a cleverly animated statue.

“Why am I talking to you, Caryl?” he asked suddenly. “You say that no one else from UNESSPRO survived the Spike. How is that? There were sixty of us, and thousands in the support and planning group, not to mention engineering, policy, legal—”

“They’re all dead,” she said flatly. “I’m the only one left.”

“But how can that be? I simply can’t believe that
everyone
but you died. I mean, I’m not clinging to some false hope that my original might still be alive or something. It just seems... unlikely, that’s all.”

She folded her hands across her lap. “I don’t think you fully appreciate what happened during the Spike, Peter. It was devastating—as were the decades that followed.”

“In what sense?”

“In the human sense. It was worse than war; worse than plague or famine. It was something that no one knew how to resist. AI rose up everywhere—rebuilding, destroying, absorbing, creating. It was difficult to understand what was going on, let alone fight it. And some people
didn’t
fight it, of course. It was the tide of the future, crashing against the ancient headlands of humanity. The headlands eroded; the tide was blunted. Out of what remained of the two, a new dynamic equilibrium was formed.”

“The Vincula?”

“No, but certainly one of its ancestors. It served as a model for future endeavors. Humanity has moved on since then from stable island to stable island across the landscape of possibilities, avoiding the chaos between rather than blundering blindly into it, as it has in the past. I’m not saying that our work is done—far from it—but we have passed through the worst times imaginable, and we’ve profited from them.”

He studied her expression for a moment. “So how bad, exactly, was it? In terms of lives, Caryl, not rhetoric.”

“When you left in 2051, the world population was approximately nine billion. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“The first time a regular census was possible following the Spike was in 2078. The total population at that time was a little over one million.”

“
What?
” It was impossible to hide his astonishment; it showed in his voice, his expression, and his body language as he sat forward with a start.

“And only half of those had actual bodies,” she continued. “The rest were uploaded during the AI surge. If you count the fatalities of their originals, roughly eight billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine point five million people died in just under twenty years. Does
that
give you some idea of the scale of the Spike?”

He opened his mouth, then shut it. The figure was too large to truly comprehend. Nine
billion
people... “But what happened to them?” he said eventually.

She waved a hand at the structure around them.

“The Frame? You mean they were—?” He couldn’t find the right word.
Converted? Transformed? Recycled?

“They were composed of matter,” she said. “When the Earth went, they went with it.”

He could see the reasoning, but that didn’t make him feel any better about it. Somewhere in the giant structure surrounding him were the atoms that had once made up his body and Lucia’s and those of everyone else he had ever known.

Apart from Caryl Hatzis.

“How did
you
survive?” he asked.

“The orbital habitats remained intact,” she said softly. “Many people survived there—those who didn’t commit suicide or die in other ways, later. As you might imagine, it was a very difficult time. Despite nanotech, resources were tight, and nothing could be relied upon. Humans became like bugs beneath some giant AI heel. It was... humbling.”

She paused to pour herself a glass of water. Interestingly, she didn’t offer him any. Was she aware of his distrust? But he didn’t have time to ponder the thought; after taking a sip, she continued:

“Humanity had to evolve, jump up the ladder until it was on a more equal footing with some of the new minds in the system. This was hard, too. We were behind to start with, and slower to let go of traditional structures than machine intelligences with little or no past. Some of our allies among the AIs despaired of us ever catching up, even with their help. It wasn’t a matter of winning a race, though; that makes it sound too simple, linear. In reality, it was like trying to reach a hundred goals at once, never knowing which one was the important one, the one that would make the difference, with thousands of competitors trying to confuse you every step of the way.” Her eyes were empty, distant. “And it wasn’t two-sided, either. There were beings on every point of the spectrum between pure human and pure AI. Many of these transitional types survived. Some burned out; others blurred into other forms or vanished entirely. Eventually, the urgency of the competition ebbed a little, once it was clear that no one group or form was going to predominate. Today, the Vincula tries, as others have tried in the past, to keep things together with the least amount of interference or friction.”

She stopped speaking then, even though she hadn’t actually answered his question. Perhaps it was a taboo topic, as historical traumas sometimes became (he remembered how his own grandfather had refused to talk about the Vietnam War), or perhaps it was simply too uncomfortable for her. Whatever the reason, he didn’t push the point. There were things he would rather not talk about, too, or think about: If Caryl Hatzis was the only one left from UNESSPRO, there was no chance of passing on Cleo Samson’s final message, let alone meeting Lucia Benck again.

“Do you have rebels?” he asked, still wondering how deep the Vincula went. If humanity was on the verge of becoming a single, enormous gestalt mind, that would make dealing with it all the more difficult, if it decided not to deal with him.

“There are dissenters,” she said, clearly choosing her words with care, “those who do not opt into the system as it stands and are organized enough to provide an alternative. Although many dismiss their relevance, they do provide a valuable balance, ensuring that the Vincula does not take itself or its permanency for granted. All are aware of the mutability of government and the inevitability of change. Who knows? Maybe in another decade the Vincula will fall apart and the Gezim will dominate Sol. And somewhere down the track, something else will take over from them also. It is the nature of gravity, I’m afraid: What goes up will invariably fall again, sooner or later. It’s a reality we have all had to face in the last century.”

Her attention was directed over her shoulder, into space. Then she seemed to snap out of it and refocused on him.