Lights in the Deep (6 page)

It was a head shot of a young woman against a bluescreen. She was of Asian descent, and spoke TransCom with an accent I suspected to be Chinese.

“If you are seeing and hearing this message,” she said, “then you are halfway to us. We know about the war, and we know that you would not have come this far unless you sought refuge. Be aware the Quorum has decided to grant asylum to all refugees from the governments of Earth, the independent satellite localities, and all colonies of the asteroids and the Jovian planets. Provided that you can reach us. We regret that we can offer no further assistance at this time. We also regret that we cannot offer you precise coordinates to follow, but if you have come this far, you already know the rest of the way. Good luck.”

The message repeated, and I was both elated and crushed.

So far. I’d come so far. Tab and Howard had sacrificed so much. And this was only
halfway?

I went back to my calculations, regarding stores and the upkeep of the hydroponics. There was no way I’d squeeze out fifteen more years, even if I thought I could last that long alone without going insane as a result. And even if I dumped the entire antimatter reserve into one, long, drawn-out burn. Which would be stupid, because then I’d have nothing left to slow myself down with when I neared the endpoint.

I stayed near the buoy, and debated at length.

The girl in the message had obviously intended for refugees to keep following the last known trajectory of Pioneer 10. Following that jellybean trail was a snap. How I could do it and still be alive upon arrival, was another matter entirely.

It took me three days of thinking and tinkering to come up with a plan.

It terrified me, because it seemed so much like suicide.

• • •

The room with the recording equipment hadn’t been touched in a long, long time. Tab had sealed it in a low-density, pure nitrogen environment after she’d helped put Howard into the computer, so that all the machinery and the consoles remained pristine and in good working order. It was also one of the few rooms the micrometeoroid disaster had not touched, and this gave me a hint of comfort while I set about preparing to download myself into the observatory’s database arrays.

I’d spent a few weeks carefully creating a new, hardened shelter for those arrays, then painstakingly moved each one of them from the old core, down to the new location, finally powering them up and synchronizing them, with triple-redundant electricity I’d snaked down from the antimatter reactors.

If the observatory got hit again, I didn’t want to suffer the same lobotomized fate of my old friend.

The instructions for recording were fairly simply. The device itself was like a compact PET scanner that lowered over the skull like a hair dryer.

The catch was that the process could not be aborted nor re-tried. The recording process took days, and was so electromagnetically intensive it destroyed neural pathways as quickly as it stored them in the databanks. Once the recorder lowered itself over my skull and began scanning, I was on a one-way trip. And since I didn’t have any help, and had never done anything like it before, there was a very good chance I’d wind up nothing more than a mindless piece of meat, my entire life hopelessly scrambled inside the computer.

I prepared carefully. In the event that I did not survive, I programmed an automatic course into the guidance system. Having come this far, it seemed worth it to make sure my remains had at least a chance of arriving at my destination. I also networked the life support servers and crossed them with the recording monitor, so that if the recording process completed and I did not awake and assume full control over the observatory, the contents of the observatory would be gradually deep-frozen.

My brain would be empty at that point anyway, and I didn’t like the idea of leaving my body to slowly rot on the recording couch.

Once I was satisfied that I’d tended to the necessary details, I sat down and considered my final words. In my entire life, through everything I’d experienced, I’d never really thought about what I’d want to leave behind for the future. It had always been someone else leaving something behind for me. I had always been the one to have to pick up the pieces and carry on. It frustrated me to sit there in front of the computer, finger poised over the button that would begin audio-video storage, and not have a damned thing to say.

After ten minutes I finally tapped the button and spoke—in TransCom, so that the people who might recover the recording would understand.

“My name is Miroslaw Jaworski. I might be the only survivor to have escaped the destruction of planet Earth. If you are viewing this message, it means that I am dead. If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like somebody to put up a placard somewhere; for myself and my family.”

I slowly repeated the full names of my sister, mother, and father, as well as my grandparents, and several extended family who had been alive when the antimatter bombs wiped out the Earth. It seemed like a good idea to include them, since we were all victims and I wanted our lives to be remembered somewhere, by somebody.

“I don’t really care what happens after that. Tabitha and Howard Marshall are entombed on the other side of this facility, and I think they should stay there. My body, and the entire contents of this observatory, are yours to do with as you see fit.

“Out.”

I punched the stop key, made sure the file replicated through my crude daisychain of stand-alone workstations, then stood up and walked to the recording room, where I slowly shut the door, set up the IV system—I’d need fluid put into me during the process, or I’d dehydrate to death before recording was complete—then sat in the recorder’s attached chair.

The recorder “crown”—which is how I’d come to think of it—was poised just centimeters above my skull. I’d detached the activator toggle from the control station and put it on a cable that allowed me to hold the toggle in my hand.

I thought about how Howard had once had to do this, with only Tab to monitor his progress.

Swallowing hard, I flipped the toggle with my thumb.

And the universe vanished into a swirl of sounds and color.

• • •

Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next. One moment I was bathed in an endless sea of shifting and chaotic images—sounds echoing across the cosmos from one side of my mind to the other—and the next moment I seemed to snap back to a state of utterly cold and solid reality.

Only, I was seeing the observatory through at least fifty different eyes, and hearing with fifty different ears, and I couldn’t blink nor turn off the input, so that I was trying to scream, but that just made things worse because my scream bellowed from fifty different speakers, which overloaded fifty different microphones, and within my head a feedback squeal like a migraine peeled across my consciousness.

It was Howard who saved me. Or, rather, his memories.

On the chance that I’d be able to access what was left of Howard’s intellect, I’d networked his old arrays in a cluster adjacent to the main set of blanks I’d set up for myself. In desperate panic, I mentally reached for Howard, and felt a quick jolt of information flow across the link. Suddenly I was on solid mental ground again, my field of vision rapidly narrowed to one camera view, and my ability to hear narrowed down to a single, neutered computer voice that simply said, “Command access granted, Mirek. Awaiting further instructions.”

The system knew my name.

I’d made it.

Only, I couldn’t
feel
excited about that. Intellectually, I think I was relieved. But the glandular
feeling
of satisfaction, of triumph, that should have been mine, was absent. All that remained was the coolness of pure, rapid thought. Thought so fast, I felt staggered by the implications. And capability. No mathematical calculation ever need be beyond my grasp again. The moment I could conceive of a problem, the answer was in my mind at the same instant. Memory recall proved similarly instant, and I took a few moments to ponder this reality, which brought on a further jolt of data from Howard’s banks, which were actively integrating with my own, now that they had a reliable cerebral matrix to map to.

It took me only a few minutes to master the network, and another few to access and test all the remaining, functional systems in the observatory.

At once, it became obvious how sloppy and haphazard I’d been. Total facility efficiency was down to forty-two percent, with a list of yellow, orange, and red-lined items stretching into the hundreds. While I scanned and prioritized, I received continual jolts of data from Howard’s arrays. One moment, I’d be wondering how to fix a certain problem. The next, the knowledge would be there, as if it had always been there. As if I’d done it a hundred times before.

Though his personality was barely perceptible in the data, like a tiny aftertaste on the tongue, Howard was still, for all intents and purposes, gone. I sent numerous mental
thank-yous
to the man’s memory, then made ready to depart the buoy, and begin the down-hill leg of my journey towards the Outbound.

• • •

One thing about being a computerized mind: I could make time go as fast or as slow as I wanted to. Weeks and months evaporated in a blink while I made necessary fixes to reactors and set up a schedule to ration the fuel supply, all the while thrusting gently up the relative velocity curve, being careful to have more than enough fuel left over at the end-point for slowing down. I had no idea what might be waiting for me there, but I knew it’d probably be bad manners to go speeding past the Outbounders like a semi that’s lost its brakes on a steep hill.

I turned my radios forward and began gently peppering my flight path with greetings for whomever it was that would meet me.

I suppose there was always a chance that nobody would meet me, and that the buoy, for all its promise, could have been a deception, or even a relic from an effort that had since failed. But my computer-dictated intellect didn’t have the capacity for real fear. Such strong emotion, I found, was purely a residual memory—like a stimulus response, now delayed. I knew I should be afraid, but this was largely a past-tense knowledge, and did not affect my overall progress, nor my determination to reach my goal.

What happened when I got there…well, I purposely tried not to wonder about that. What use would the Outbound have for a computer mind like me? It wasn’t like I could just put myself back into my own head again. Nor, I began to think, would I want to. The expanded capacity of the neural arrays was almost intoxicating, and after a couple of years had passed I suspected that if ever I had to be restricted again to one set of eyes, one set of ears, one set of senses, I might feel so claustrophobic about the whole affair, I’d go mad.

With the main telescope mostly wrecked, I deployed the backup and used my idle cycles to scan and chart the narrow sliver of the Kuiper Belt through which I passed.

It really was amazing, to see so much debris in an area of space that most humans had thought of as empty, even up to and through the twenty-second century. Only the Outbound had had the forethought to see this region for what it truly was: a refuge from the catastrophes that were sure to strike the planets of the solar system—be they comet or asteroids, intense solar flares, or as had actually happened, the competitive stupidity of humanity itself.

Out in the Kuiper Belt, there was room enough to get lost. Like a hermit penetrating deep into the wild, seeking resources enough to survive and distance enough to avoid the madness of humanity.

I found two more buoys, each with a similar message to the first.

My antimatter fuel passed the point of no return, making it totally impossible to go back to the Jovian region of space. But I paid little attention. I was Outbound now, and there would never be any going back.

Another decade’s worth of time elapsed in surreal ease, and at the end of that, another micrometeoroid shower hit. But I’d secured the vital systems before putting myself into the computer, and the effort paid off. Nothing critical was damaged, though the hydroponics and other life support systems would never operate again—too many micro-holes.

I wondered why my messages, which I had been casting ahead of me like rocks across a pond, garnered no response.

Maybe that was just the nature of being Outbound—never reveal yourself until the time it’s absolutely necessary.

At the twenty-ninth year since leaving Jupiter, I should have felt excited and nervous with anticipation.

I felt only lingering ghosts.

• • •

I never saw the other ship.

One moment, I was alone in space. The next moment, a fifty-meter-wide wedge was matching course and speed—which was no small feat.

I politely lobbed radio hellos at the wedge, anticipating a reply. But all the wedge did was spit out a dozen, tinier wedges, each of which fell on the observatory like fleas on the ass of a dog, and suddenly I was struck by the notion that I’d been baited into a colossal mouse trap.

Each of the small wedges touched down and disgorged a series of spider-like drones that began scrambling into the observatory’s interior, cutting through metal and rock as easily as a knife through butter.

My hello calls became pressed, and then frantic. The spiders blindly ignored my efforts and sped towards the hole where I’d stashed the memory arrays. My cameras and others senses followed them, and I’d have screamed if I’d still felt the kind of visceral panic necessary.

I remember one last camera view, overlooking the arrays. I watched a spider climb on top of my databanks, hungrily rubbing together its claw-tipped forelegs, then I sensed my mind fissioning into separate parts—which seemed like the worst kind of insanity imaginable—then merciful blackness.

• • •

Reactivation was bothersome, because they wouldn’t let me see, hear, nor sense anything. Not at first. All I got was the
impression
that someone needed me to be patient, so I waited, tasting the quality of my thoughts and finding them…Truncated. Limited. The absolute speed and precision of the observatory’s databanks was missing. It felt like…It
felt
like?