The Ghosts of Heaven (25 page)

He flops down into the chair in front of Terminal Base Four, and that's when he sees the series of red lights blinking on the screen in front of him.

Six of the five hundred are dead.

 

1

Of all the problems that faced the world, there was one that nothing could be done about, because it was caused by the success of eradicating all the other threats to human life: overpopulation.

It took centuries longer for the world to civilize than anyone ever anticipated. But eventually it did. As artificially grown meat solved the food crises; as the threat of climate change stabilized with the disappearance of fossil fuels and their replacement with renewable power; as even the poorest countries in the world became rich enough to be well off as the driving forces for wars dissipated; as finally people everywhere became comfortable enough that their need for religion waned and dwindled, a truly united world Global-Government faced the last remaining issue: there was no longer enough room for the billions of people living in the thin film of habitable space wrapped around the planet. Deserts had been hydrated, floating cities spawned, even the Antarctic colonized, and yet still the birth rate shot ever-upward.

As the memory of times of war and conflict began to raise itself in countries' collective minds, the world clamored for a solution to the problem. In response, birth limits were introduced, and so the population began to slowly level off, but, by now, the question of the long-term prospects for the human race was high in people's minds. It was, many people felt, in man's nature to explore, to expand, in short: to live. The desire to survive and prosper, it was argued, is the very meaning of life itself. It must go on, forever, without limit, and to deny that would be to deny life. Mankind should not live with birth quotas and assent forms and enforced sterilisation.

Billions of dollars were spent merely researching potential solutions, but they all revolved around the same idea: a new Earth must be found, or made.

As attempts to seed an atmosphere on Mars repeatedly failed, a new strand of thought emerged, so very unthinkable until all other possibilities had been exhausted: we must move to some distant, and already Earth-like, planet.

The problems facing such an endeavor were plentiful, but the biggest was also the simplest: the nearest habitable world known was very far away. So far that it would take light around one hundred and seventy years to reach it.

The planet, orbiting a star in the constellation of Lyca, had been dubbed New Earth centuries before anyone ever thought of going there; all the analysis showed this distant world was as close a cousin to our own as could ever be found anywhere, an Eden, waiting to be colonized. But, ever adaptable, the people of the world began to change their viewpoint. This was a journey of a previously unimaginable kind, and yet there was nothing in theory to prevent it. Each obstacle in the way of such a mission was attacked ruthlessly. Trillions were spent researching matters from zero-waste nutrients to chorophyll-based oxygen generators to the issues of the deleterious effects of space travel on the human body; from muscle and bone wastage issues, to electromagnetic shielding against interstellar radiation. The question of how to achieve near-speed-of-light travel was resolved after thirty years of development on the Clarke Drive, a radiation pressure engine that steadily imparted impulse to the mass of the ship.

Eventually, each and every problem was defeated.

Finally, there only remained the question of who would dare to venture on such a journey. People reminded each other of previous epic journeys made by mankind. History books told of the voyage of the
Mayflower
, but the comparison was weak. These would not be a hundred souls on board a ship crossing the ocean in a couple of months to colonize another continent; a continent much like the one they'd left, with other ships soon to follow.

Though New Earth was one hundred and seventy light-years away, the
Song
's journey would take only around a hundred years of ship time to complete, one of the advantages of traveling close to light speed being that time dilation would make clocks on board run slower. With its passengers effectively frozen in time until they reached New Earth, and the ten sentinels to each wake just ten times for half a day to monitor the ship's progress.

These people would never come back. News of them would never come back.

Who would go on such a mission?

The answer, we should not have been surprised, was
millions
of people. As five Toroid ships were prepared by the Global-Government, one for each continent, the number of people not only willing but desperate to be part of the first wave of colonization grew. Debates raged endlessly; even those who had no interest in going had strong views on who should be allowed to.

Scientists would be needed, that much everyone agreed. Technicians of all kinds. Doctors. Engineers. But what of the other areas of human life? Should artists be included, and musicians? Wouldn't a life without such things be pointless to the human animal?

The arguments continued, but when it was announced that each of the five ships would hold just five hundred passengers. The arguments erupted into disbelief. Of the 45 billion people on the planet, how could just 2,500 be chosen? And what of these guardians, the sentinels? How could there be just ten per ship, fifty in all? Who would ever dare to make such choices? What calculations or formulas could scientists ever derive to neatly give such answers?

There was one calculation that was indisputable: the minimum number of people per ship should be at least five hundred. Below that number, there would not be a sufficiently diverse gene pool to support the healthy rebirth of the human species on New Earth. Below that number, the possibility of the Founder Effect was too great: the genes of one person could start to dominate the population with, theoretically at least, disastrous results.

But who would be the five hundred? And who would be the ten?

Keir Bowman knew he would be among them.

Yes, he'd worked on the Americas Continent Toroid, developing software for control systems. Yes, he'd been trained as an astronaut. Yes, he had no family ties: no wife, child, or parents living. His psychometric testing had shown him to be a near-perfect candidate for a sentinel. Early experiments in space travel within the Solar System had quickly demonstrated that no matter how high a compatibility score a group of astronauts might achieve, given the timescales involved, factions and politics and even fights would develop eventually in the close confines of the ship. The answer was the loner. The individual who preferred no other company than this own thoughts. Of course, the danger was that such individuals often displayed borderline psychopathic traits. The key was to find just the right person: calm, contained, at peace with their true nature, able to go for long periods in isolation.

Bowman knew he would be one of them. Partly because he was the near-perfect candidate anyway, and partly because he'd hacked the computers of the Americas' Selection Committee in order to erase the report of obsessional tendencies in his psychometric test results.

 

2

“Never look back,” was something Bowman remembered his father telling him. It was about the only thing Bowman could remember of him, a man who'd died when his son was a young man. It was certainly the thing that he'd taken most to heart as a boy.

Bowman had never looked back in his whole life. Not once. Even before he left Earth on the shuttle to the
Song of Destiny,
he had been floating free. Floating away from people, away from his family, away from his last lover, to whom he had formed only the weakest attachment. He was always looking ahead, desperate to be somewhere else, though he never knew what it was that he wanted.

So now, staring at a computer screen that tells him that just over 1 percent of the population have died, for reasons unknown, he does not for one minute question his choice to become a sentinel, or regret coming aboard the
Song of Destiny.

The fact that six people have died since the Sentinel Five was on duty a year ago was worrying enough, but there are further complications. Why didn't the computer wake him earlier, when the first death happened? The ship is programmed to wake the next sentinel in line for duty in the case of any untoward emergency, anything that it cannot sort itself. The fact that it allowed the deaths to continue is strange in itself. Maybe all six had died at once, but then comes the next problem: How did they die?

He glances at the large bio-clock above Terminal Base Four; the readout of his status displayed for him to see at all times. He has eleven and a quarter hours in which to find the cause of the deaths, work out how to prevent any more from occurring, and reboot the automatic alert systems.

He begins tapping away at the smooth black keypad. It seems so old-fashioned to interact with the computer in this way when Earth is full of gestural readers and brainwave-synced devices, but the designers of the Toroid ships wanted no room for the errors those devices still sometimes create. With a keypad, if you touch the glass then you touch the glass, and the extra time and physical movement it takes to do that gives everything a much more mechanical certainty. Bowman doesn't mind, and his fingers are fast.

He starts to run reports on the six dead pods, and that's when he starts to feel uneasy, because nothing is wrong. Since the medical history of all 510 people on the ship is recorded constantly while in their pod, any change in health whatsoever should show on the reports.

He feeds the reports through a medical analyzer, just to be sure he isn't missing anything, but the result is just as he'd first thought. Nothing was wrong with the people who'd died, until the moment of death, when their miniscule brain function flat-lined.

The obvious conclusion; there's something faulty with the pods themselves. Bowman runs tech read-outs for the six pods, all of which are stationed a way away from him; between Bases One and Two. Over two kilometers away. The results are the same as with the people themselves. There is nothing apparently wrong with the pods either, and yet something is wrong somewhere; and something must be wrong with the alert system itself for the ship not to have woken him.

He is alone.

There is no one to help him solve this puzzle, but that's the way he likes it. He sits back and takes a precious two minutes of his waking time trying to decide what to do.

First, he reads the last report from Sentinel Five for signs of any issues, anything that might indicate problems were forthcoming. Sentinel Five's report is so routine as to be boring; everything was fine a year ago, and yet, somewhere in the time that followed, six pods went offline.

He is alone.

The ship's computers can only help him as far as he directs them to. The network of these computers is vast and unbelievably complex, but it is still only a computer network. Long ago it was decided that artificial intelligence systems posed just as great a risk to ultra-long space flight as teams of astronauts do. Suzuki's Law; that the closer a computer interface gets to seeming truly human, the more humans find it disturbing, holds true in space just as it did on Earth. In fact, given the isolation, having an artificial intelligence, a computer-generated voice, a hologram or other user interface to interact with, slowly eats away at us for some reason; unnerving us, unsettling us, until we feel that we are talking to a ghost, or some spectral god.

Bowman, therefore, is alone, but that is why he was chosen for the mission; because he is fast, decisive, and doesn't need support from anyone else to make those decisions.

Even he, however, realizes it would be good to start recording a log for Sentinel Seven, should he not solve everything during this waking. So he sets up a recording, linked to his profile.

“Six failures are showing. No cause of death obvious in any case. No faults logged with the pods of the six. Alert systems did not operate. Proceeding to investigate.”

He sits back, and thinks a little, knowing the recording will deactivate until he starts speaking again.

“There is another possibility, of course. Perhaps the alert system did not operate because the six occupants are not actually dead; maybe the fault is with the reporting of the pod status.”

He sits up again, because he knows there is only one way to be sure. Since the computer is adamant that there is nothing wrong with the pods, he will have to go and look at each one and see for sure whether the occupant inside is alive or dead.

He checks the screens. The closest inoperative pod is almost three kilometers away. There is nothing for it but to walk.

“Proceeding to visual check of negative pods,” he says, and without further hesitation, he opens the door to the deck and sets out for pod 89.

He's walking “uphill,” against the direction of rotation of the
Song
. The rotation of the ship is a constant, and given its vast size, just under one rpm is enough to equate to one g. The effect of walking against the motion of spin is very slight, but noticeable, and Bowman begins to think it would have been faster to walk to the second-closest faulty pod, 4, even though it is actually farther away.

As he reaches pod 89, he checks the time on the clock on the wrist of his suit. He has ten hours left in which to work.

Longsleep pods look different from sentinel pods. Whereas his own is a long, blue, swollen cigar set against the wall of the deck, pod 89, like all the Longsleep pods, is white and much thinner. It is featureless on the outside; only the seal, closed now for twenty-six years, is just discernable, otherwise there is nothing to be gained by staring at the number etched in black on its white surface. It does not even bear the name of the person inside.

Underneath it are two drawers; the first contains the few personal effects that each occupant has been allowed to bring on the mission. On his previous, uneventful, wakings, Bowman has often thought about what strange things lie in these 510 drawers. He knows what is in his own, of course; not much. A book of poetry and some clothes that he really likes. But what weird things have the others chosen to bring to New Earth? He suspects there are lots of books; real paper books; such a status symbol these days, a mark of refinement and intellect. There will be photographs of loved ones, never to be seen again. Are there weirder things? Pointless things? Things of superstition?