Godlike Machines (49 page)

Perri paused, staring at his unseen audience.

“You were gone a very long time,” he mentioned. “Jan claimed you were off chasing Clackers, and that’s what the official report decides too. Lost in the fuel tanks somewhere. But I didn’t hear any recent news about bodies being fished out of the liquid hydrogen, which makes me wonder if our mutual friend was telling another one of his fables.

“Anyway, good to hear from you again, Harper. And welcome back to the living!”

11

As promised, Bottom-E held one enormous room, and except for the occasional smudge of cold light on the high arching ceiling, the room was delightfully dark. Each step on the slick floor teased out memories. That lost and now beloved childhood returned to him, and Alone wasn’t just content, but he was confident that the next step would bring happiness, and the one after, and the one after that.

More than 1200 square kilometers of hyperfiber demanded his careful study. Unlike the hull, there was an atmosphere, but the air was oxygen-starved and nearly as cold as space. Like before, Alone’s habit was to follow a random line until an oddity caught his attention. Then he would stop and study what another visitor had left behind—a fossilized meal or frozen bodily waste, usually—and then he would attack another random line until a new feature caught his senses, or until a wall of rough feldspar defined the limits of this illusion.

For almost two years, he walked quietly, seeing no one else.

The LoYo were tiny and weakly lit, and there was no sign that they noticed him, much less understood what he was.

Perri’s mysterious glow failed to appear. But Alone soon convinced himself that he’d never hoped the story would prove real. One step was followed by the next, and then he would pause and turn and step again, defining a new line, and then without warning, there was a sliver of time when that simple cherished pattern failed him. He suddenly caught sight of a thin but genuine reddish light that his big eyes swallowed and studied, examining the glow photon by photon, instinct racing ahead of his intelligence, assuring him that this new light was identical to the glow he leaked when he was examining a fossilized pile of alien feces.

On his longest, quietest legs, Alone ran.

Then the voice returned. Decades had passed since the last time Alone felt its presence, yet it was suddenly with him, uttering the concept, “No,” wrapped inside a wild, infectious panic.

His first impulse was to stop and ask, “What do you want?”

But the red glow was closer now, and Alone’s voice, even rendered as a breathless whisper, might be noticed. If that other entity heard him, it could become afraid, vanishing by some secret means. The moment was too important to accept that risk. The end of a long solitude might be here, if only Alone was brave enough to press on. That’s what he had decided long ago, imagining this unlikely moment. He would accept almost any danger to make contact with another like him. But only now, caught up in the excitement, did Alone realize how much this mattered to him. He was excited, yes. Thrilled and spellbound. Every flavor of bravery made him crazy, and he refused to answer the voice or even pay attention when it came closer and grew even louder, warning him, “Do not.” Telling him, “No. They want, but they will not understand. Do not.”

The light was still visible, but it had grown weaker.

The intervening distance had grown.

The other Alone must have noticed something wrong. A footfall, a murmur. Perhaps his brother heard the voice too, and the wild, unapologetic fear had taken possession of him. Whatever the reason, the light was beginning to fade away, losing him by diving inside a little tunnel, abandoning this room and possibly Bottom-E because of one irresistible terror.

Alone had to stop his brother.

But how?

He quit running.

The voice that had never identified itself-the conscience that perhaps was too ancient, too maimed and run down, to even lend itself a name-now said to him, “Go away. This is the wrong course. Go!”

Alone would not listen.

Standing on that barren plain, he made himself grow tiny and exceptionally bright, washing away the darkness. In an instant, the enormous chamber was filled with a sharp white light that reached the walls and rose to the ceiling before vanishing in the next instant.

Then he was dark again, drained but not quite exhausted.

With the last of his reserves, Alone spun a fresh mouth, and in a language that he had never heard before—never suspected that he was carrying inside himself—he screamed into the newly minted darkness, “I am here!”

Suddenly a dozen machines emerged from their hiding places, plunging from the ceiling or racing from blinds inside the towering rock walls.

Alone tried to vanish.

But the machines were converging on him.

Then he grew large again, managing legs. But the power expended by his desperate flash and careless shout was too much, and too many seconds were needed before he would be able to offer them any kind of chase. After thousands of years, the door of a trap was closing over him, and in the end there wouldn’t even be the pleasure of a hard chase fought to the dramatic end.

12

Since their last meeting, the two organisms had walked separate lines-tightrope existences inspired by chance and ambition, deep purpose and the freedom of no clear purpose. An observer on a high perch, watching their respective lives, might have reasonably concluded that the two souls would never meet again. There was no cause for the lines to cross. The odd machine was quiet and modest, successfully avoiding discovery in the emptiest reaches of the Ship, while the engineer was busy maintaining the giant engines, and later, she was responsible for a slow-blooming career as a new captain. The remote observer would have been at a loss to contrive any situation that would place them together, much less in this unlikely terrain. Embarrassed, Aasleen confessed that she had had no good idea where Alone might have been and not been over these last tens of thousands of years. For decades, for entire centuries, she didn’t waste time pondering the device that she once cornered and then let get away. Not that she was at peace with her failure. She was proud of her competence and didn’t appreciate evidence to the contrary. Somewhere onboard the Great Ship was a barely contained speck of highly compressed matter, and should that speck ever break containment, then the next several seconds would become violent and famous, and for some souls, exceptionally sad.

This was a problem that gnawed, when Aasleen allowed it to. But as an engineer, she handed her official worries to the Submaster Miocene, and as a novice captain, she had never once been approached with any duty that had even the most glancing relationship to that old problem.

She told her story now, assuming that her prisoner would both understand what he heard and feel interested in this curious, quirky business.

Then several centuries ago, Aasleen and another captain met by chance and fell into friendly conversation. It was that other captain who mentioned a newly discovered machine-building species. Washen had a talent for aliens, Aasleen explained. Better than most humans, her colleague could decipher the attitudes and instincts of organisms that made no sense to a pragmatic, by-the-number soul like her. But the aliens, dubbed the Bakers, had been superior engineers. That’s why Washen mentioned them in the first place. She explained their rare genius for building inventive and persistent devices, and millions of years after their rise and fall and subsequent extinction, their machines were still scattered across the galaxy.

“Bakers is our name for them,” Aasleen cautioned. “It shouldn’t mean anything to you.”

Alone was floating above the cavern floor, encased in a sequence of cages, plasmas and overlapping magnetic fields creating a prison that was nearly invisible and seemingly unbreakable. Drifting in the middle of the smallest cage, he was in a vacuum, nothing but his own body to absorb into an engine that everybody else seemed to fear. With a flickering radio voice, he agreed. “I don’t know the Bakers.”

“How about this?” Aasleen asked.

Another sound, intense and brief, washed across him. He listened carefully, and then he politely asked to hear it again. “I don’t know the name,” he confessed. “But the words make sense to me.”

“I’m not surprised,” Aasleen allowed.

Alone waited.

“We know what you are,” she promised.

His response, honest and tinged with emotion, was to tell his captor, “I already know what I am. My history barely matters.”

“All right,” Aasleen allowed. “Do I stop talking? Should I keep my explanations to myself?”

He considered the possibility. But machines and teams of engineers were working hard, obviously preparing to do some large job. As long as the woman in the mirrored uniform was speaking, nothing evil would be done to him. So finally, with no doubt in the voice, he said, “Tell me about these Bakers.”

“They built you.”

“Perhaps so,” he allowed.

“Seven hundred million years ago,” Aasleen added. Then a bright smile broke open, and she added, “Which means that you are the second oldest machine that I have ever known.”

The Great Ship being the oldest.

Quietly, with a voice not quite accustomed to lecturing, she explained, “The Bakers were never natural travelers. We don’t know a lot about them, and most of our facts come through tertiary sources. But as far as we can determine, that species didn’t send even one emissary out into the galaxy. Instead of traveling, they built wondrous durable drones and littered an entire arm of the galaxy with them. Their machines were complicated and adaptable, and they were purposefully limited in what they knew about themselves. You see, the Bakers didn’t want to surrender anything about themselves, certainly not to strangers. They were isolated and happy to be that way. But they were also curious, in a fashion, and they could imagine dangerous neighbors wanting to do them harm. That’s why they built what looks to me like an elaborate empty bottle—a bottle designed to suck up ideas and emotions and history and intellectual talents from whatever species happens to come along. And when necessary, those machines could acquire the shape and voice of the locals too.”

Nothing about the story could be refuted. Alone accepted what he heard, but he refused to accept that any of it mattered.

Aasleen continued, explaining, “The Bakers lasted for ten or twelve million years, and then their worlds ecosystem collapsed. They lived at the far end of our galaxy, as humans calculate these measures. The only reason we’ve learned anything about them is that one of our newest resident species have collected quite a few of these old bottles. In partial payment for their ongoing voyage, they’ve shared everything they know about the Bakers. It’s not the kind of knowledge that I chase down for myself. But Washen knew that I’d be interested in dead engineers. And she mentioned just enough that I recognized what was being described, and I interrupted to tell her that I knew where another bottle was, and this one was still working.

“‘Where is it?’ she asked.

“I told her, ‘Wandering inside the Great Ship, he is, and he answers to the very appropriate name of Alone.”

The captain paused, smiling without appearing happy.

Alone watched the workers. An elaborate needle was being erected on the cavern floor, aiming straight up at him.

“We approached Miocene with our news,” Aasleen continued. “I know Washen was disappointed. But I was given the job of finding you again, and if possible, corralling you. Washen helped me profile your nature. Your powers. I decided to lure you in with the promise of another machine like you, and that’s why I turned Bottom-E into a halfway famous abode for a glowing shape-shifting soul. If something went ugly-wrong down here, then at least the damage could be contained.”

“What about the LoYo?” Alone asked.

“They’ve been moved to other quarters. The lights above are hiding sensors, and I designed them myself, and they didn’t help at all. Until that light show, we couldn’t be certain that you were anywhere near this place.”

The needle was quickly growing longer, reaching for the cage’s outermost wall.

“What will you do now?” Alone asked.

“Strip away your engine, first. And then we’ll secure it and you.” Aasleen tried to describe the process, offering several incomprehensible terms to bolster her expertise. But she seemed uneasy when she said, “Then we’ll isolate your neural net and see what it is and how it works.”

“You are talking about my mind,” Alone complained.

“A mind that lives beside a powerful, unexploded bomb,” the captain added. “The Bakers didn’t design you to survive for this long. My best guess is that you pushed yourself outside the Milky Way, and in that emptiness, nothing went wrong. You drifted. You waited. I suppose you slept, in a fashion. And then you happened upon the Great Ship, before or after we arrived. You could have been here long before us, but of course the Bakers are lost, and you weren’t what I would consider sentient.”

“But I am now,” he said, his voice small and furious.

Aasleen paused.

Without apparent effort, the needle began to pass through the wall of the first impenetrable cage.

“You are going to kill me,” he insisted.

The human was not entirely happy with these events. It showed in her posture, her face. But she was under orders, and she was confident enough in her skills to say, “I don’t think anything bad will happen. A great deal of research and preparation has been done, and we have an excellent team working on you. Afterwards, I think you’ll prefer having all of your memories pulled loose and set inside safer surroundings.”

With a sudden thrust, the needle pierced the other cages, and before it stopped rising, its bright plasmatic tip was touching his center.

Damage was being done.

Quietly but fiercely, he begged Aasleen, “Stop.”

One of the nearby machines began to wail, the tone ominous and quickening. Aasleen looked at the data for a moment, and then too late, she lifted one of her hands, shouting, “Stop it now. We’ve got the alignment wrong!”