Interzone #244 Jan - Feb 2013 (14 page)

Evolution can be slow. To build a hawk or a daffodil can take several million years. But it can also be very fast. Axon’s brain was a war zone as strategies competed. But eventually, all wars come to an end.

Thirty-seven hours later the anaesthetists turned off the systems which had been keeping Mariam and Victor safe from the storm in their bunker of unconsciousness.

Mariam’s first thought was not hers: “I could do with a swim.
” She smiled as the nurse held the plastic beaker of water to her lips.

Victor opened his eyes and saw a thought that was an equation.
“Sparse search on eleven dimensional vector space in log(n) time. Not bad for a twelve-year-old!”

* *

The ship was
two thousand metres long and shaped like an elongated silver ovoid with lattices of filigree golden wire at each end, like a vast insect egg trapped between the centres of two magical spiders’ webs that connected to – nothing. The light from the star reflected from its body and drive webs, but here there were no eyes to see its strange beauty. It orbited the star silently, patiently and entirely automatically. Yes, it did contain life – plants, seeds, soil, saplings, mature olive trees, fish, sheep, ravens and cabbages – but they were all frozen and silent in the hold. The control bridge, with its comfortable chairs and wraparound 3D screens was empty. All was dark; the screens and tell-tale lights were of no use to a room without observers.

Sixteen navigational and systems computers controlled the ship’s status constantly and voted on any required action, which, since they had arrived into the vicinity of the star Angelus XI three hundred Earth days ago, had been next to nothing apart from a unanimous decision to send a mining drone to a metal-rich asteroid within easy reach.

It had been a long journey. The silicon-based computers could not manage the complexity of a level three void jump, and they’d coasted here at only near light-speed.

The ship was waiting.

In an orbit perpendicular to the ship a strange object moved around Angelus XI. Take a can of beer and add a cone to one end and half of a transparent ball to the other. Add gigantic light-catching wings radiating from its waist, and colour it a blue so deep it bordered on the ultraviolet. Now, expand the length of the can to fourteen thousand metres, and spin it slowly around the long axis. Add some powerful transmitters that broadcast, on a sweeping frequency band covering most of the electromagnetic spectrum, the following message: “Bio-containment station Alpha Delta Epsilon Theta Seventeen. Warning. Unauthorised approaches within one million kilometres will trigger lethal and indiscriminate attack. This facility is protected with a network of cloaked military drones with a lot of fire-power and a minimal sense of humour. Have a very nice day.”

Times passes. That’s its job. Sixteen-year-old Victor was sitting on the beach beside the lake eating something that resembled a hamburger. He refused to go into the water where Mariam floated, flipped and dived.

“Why won’t you show me the world?” Victor thought.

“It
’s not allowed.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t be stupid, Victor. If I could tell you why, you would see it. Go for a swim while you can.”

“And if I don’t?”

“I won’t share some quite cute solutions for quantum gravity. No swim, no tell.”

Victor kicked off his shoes, his T-shirt and shorts, walked down to the edge of the water, and stuck his toes in. “It’s freezing!” he yelled. Mariam emerged from the lake very close to the shore and splashed water over Victor. He ran back up the beach, swearing.

In the cluster of buildings that housed the Axon development system, Somerton was hosting a five-hour crucial meeting of the full team. “This,” he said, “is the decision point. If there are any doubts you must articulate them now.”

One by one the teams voted. Only the Senior Biochemist raised an issue. “The complexity of Axon is now, as we would expect, far beyond our diagnostics. However, we can see some zones that are constantly changing – changing faster than we would expect. Specifically, these are in the inferior temporal gyrus region. We predict that this pattern will eventually stabilise, but I must flag up this slight anomaly. We have no objection to advancement.”

“Very well,” Somerton said. “Many of you have given the best years of your lives to this project. There have been differences, and quite properly so, but we move towards our goal united in the will to succeed. I hereby authorise advancement to level Sigma.”

Far away, the ship decoded a signal and began to move.

Julia walked down from the Centre towards the lake as the flyer came in low over the beach with a sound like a deep breath. They ran towards her.

“What was that?”

“Get dressed. Then you really can come and see your world.”

The gate to the runway was open. The flyer was parked on an apron area, gleaming bright blue, its hatch raised and stairs ascended into its interior. Even Victor’s constant stream of questions ceased as they walked across the apron following Julia. Axon was also unusually quiet.

Mariam thought “What is it?”

“I
’m too busy to talk,” came the reply.

“Come,” Julia said, and led the way up the stairs into the flyer. Three rows of light blue seats were arranged just behind the wide windscreen. Behind them was a large cargo area. Everything was tastefully colour-coordinated – what might have been harsh edges rounded and softened.

“This is a flyer,” Julia said. “Sit in the front seats. This is the most important day of your lives. So far, at least.”

As soon as they sat down, shoulder restraints moved gently into place. Julia had taken the control seat. Had Mariam and Victor lived in a different place in a different time they might have been concerned at the lack of any visible controls and any sign of a pilot. Julia inspected the flyer’s identification code neatly stencilled onto the bulkhead below the windscreen. Some things, over centuries, slip from languages and cultures, whilst others stick and are still used when their origins are lost in obscurity.

“Charlie Delta Golf,” she said.

“Yes, Julia,” a soft male voice responded.

“Lock my voice only.”

“Yes, Julia.”

“Depart the facility, and then fly a circumaxial route at three thousand meters and just above stall speed.”

“Yes, Julia.”

The cabin door swung downwards and closed with a hiss.

“Performing mandatory biohazard check.”

A stream of almost invisible nano-scale particles issued from a vent in the roof of the flyer and formed tenuous clouds around the three of them.

“What’s this?” Victor demanded.

“A routine check to see if we have any infections that might cause problems for other people.”

The nano clouds swept back into the roof and the flyer said “Cleared for take-off.” Powerful fan jets wound up to a roar and they began to taxi out to the runway, turning to face a long strip of lights that stretched away into the distance. Then they accelerated quickly, the nose lifted, and the flyer headed for what Mariam and Victor knew as the sky.

Overhead it seemed misty. Below, the buildings of the Facility shrank, and at two thousand feet it was clear that this was a tiny world that was like an undulating disc of green hills and sparkling water. Then, ahead of them, the mist began to move and a circular aperture appeared in what they thought of as the sky, but was really a huge inflated dome of light biologically impermeable plastic. When the opening reached a diameter precisely two metres wider than the flyer’s wings the expansion stopped. Seconds later the aircraft passed through, and the hole in the dome began to close.

Mariam and Victor gasped as they realised they had been living in a small bubble inside a vast space. The inside of the Bio-Containment station Alpha Delta Epsilon Theta Seventeen was a cylindrical space thirteen thousand metres long and many kilometres in diameter. A white tubular structure ran along the entire axis, and from it service and support spokes radiated down to a curving landscape of farms, villages, workshops, parks, lakes, harbours and roads.

“Did you know this, Axon?” Victor thought – a thought coloured, perhaps, with tints of anger.

“I did.
”

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

“It was not permitted. Or, to put it another way, it was not possible.”

“Is there more you can’t tell us?”

The flyer descended to a thousand feet and then flew low. The huge cylinder seemed to rotate below them.

Julia received a brief message in her transparent earpiece, and said, “You’re talking to Axon. Would you like Axon to explain, or shall I?”

“Both,” Mariam said.

“I
’m too busy,” Axon said. Mariam repeated this to Julia, and added, “What’s Axon doing?”

“Developing. Growing very fast. Learning interfaces. Testing controls. Now – look over there – you see that white dome? It’s another bubble, like the one you were born and brought up in. There are eight domes. Each dome has, or had, a thing like Axon growing inside it. Charlie Delta Golf, fly the axis – close.”

“Yes, Julia.”

The flyer rose and turned from its track inside the circumference of the cylinder, and rotated so that ‘down’ was now the thirteen kilometre extent of the axial tube. The engine noise reduced to a low hiss as it changed from full- to low-gravity mode and the atmospheric pressure reduced to near-nothing. It was now less of an aircraft than a space shuttle, steered and propelled by impulse and correction jets of superheated steam. From the interior it seemed to be flying a straight line along the axial spine, but was in reality moving with a corkscrew movement to compensate for the rotation of the cylindrical worldlet.

Julia spoke to the flyer again, and dipped towards the wall that closed the end of the giant cylinder. At ‘ground’ level a door slid upwards and closed behind them as soon as they had flown in. They landed silently on a grey steel floor, next to three other flyers, each brightly coloured. The hangar was high and wide, with tool bays, hoists, service pits and gantries. Julia watched Mariam and Victor carefully, prepared to halt this voyage of discovery if they were being mentally overloaded. But, subliminally, they knew all this because the knowledge had been implanted subtly and appeared only in dreams. They chattered endlessly, pointing things out to each other.

“Come,” Julia said, as the restraining arms slid back into their chairs, the hatch opened, and the stairs touched the floor with a quick clang of metal on metal.

When the human-scale door opened into the next chamber the bright light of Angelus XI flooded the hangar and they squinted at this new shock to the senses. As they entered they saw through the thick glass windows the uncountable splash of the fiery points that made up the Milky Way.

Mariam shivered. “It’s all so…big,” she said. “Too big.”

A huge egg-like shape covered the sky as the ship completed its deceleration phase, and, with machine precision, matched orbits with the rotating worldlet.

“What’s that?” Victor asked.

Julia put her arms about their shoulders and said, “That, my darlings, is your new home.”

* *

Axon’s spherical container,
with umbilicals connecting to temporary nutrient tanks, pumps, sensory interface cables, all on a metal-wheeled base, rolled slowly and carefully out of the bay doors in the side of the containment, surrounded by a posse of anxious attendants, and an even more anxious Director Somerton. Victor walked beside him, asking an endless stream of questions, until Somerton finally told him to go and pester somebody else.

Mariam swam in the lake, diving for flashing silver fish, floating on her back looking up at what she once thought was the sky, and now knew to be the canopy of the containment dome lit by the huge artificial sunlight generators arrayed along the axial spine far above.

“You are sad, Mariam,” Axon’s thought-voice said, gently.

“Am I? Yes, I think perhaps I am. I shall miss the fish.”

“There are lakes and fish in the ship.”

“Not these fish. These are my fish.”

“I understand.”

“Do you, Axon? Can you?”

“I am in you. You are in me. These are my fish, too.” A long pause, and Axon added, “They want you to get ready.”

For one last time she flipped onto her stomach, pointed her heels up at the fake sky and moved down among the fish, the weeds, the crabs in the rocks on the lake bed – staying underwater until she was nearly at the shore.

The rails ran to the base of the nearest spoke connecting the floor of the cylinder to the axis. At the base of the fifty metre wide spoke, inside the wide doors that had hissed aside, a pressurised lift waited. The strange procession of Axon and his attendants rolled slowly into the lift. Clamps secured the sphere and its equipment to the floor, and were checked and double checked. People took to seats around the circumference of the lift, and buckled harnesses. The doors closed, the air pressure increased a little as the lift sealed itself and began to rise within the spoke. A cloud of smart nano filled the air with a fine mist – probing the humans for traces of unpermitted viruses of microbial life, and, where necessary, purging, excising, cleaning.