The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (13 page)

“In a way that’s a good thing. It will likely take generations to decode this stuff, if we ever do, the way it took the Renaissance Europeans generations to make sense of the legacy of antiquity. The sheer time factor is a culture-shock prophylactic.

“So are you going to bend the rules for me, Jack? Come on, man. Remember what Dad said. Solving puzzles like this is what we do. We both ate Turing’s apples . . .”

He wasn’t entirely without guile. He knew how to entice me. He turned out to be wrong about the culture shock, however.

2029

Two armed coppers escorted me through the Institute building. The big glass box was entirely empty save for me and the coppers and a sniffer dog. The morning outside was bright, a cold spring day, the sky a serene blue, elevated from Wilson’s latest madness.

Wilson was sitting in the Clarke project office, beside a screen across which data displays flickered. He had big slabs of Semtex strapped around his waist, and some kind of dead man’s trigger in his hand. My brother, reduced at last to a cliché suicide bomber. The coppers stayed safely outside.

“We’re secure.” Wilson glanced around. “They can see us but they can’t hear us. I’m confident of that. My firewalls —” When I walked towards him he held up his hands. “No closer. I’ll blow it, I swear.”

“Christ, Wilson.” I stood still, shut up, and deliberately calmed down.

I knew that my boys, now in their teens, would be watching every move on the spy-hack news channels. Maybe nobody could hear us, but Hannah, now a beautiful eleven-year-old, had plenty of friends who could read lips. That would never occur to Wilson. If I was to die today, here with my lunatic of a brother, I wasn’t going to let my boys remember their father broken by fear.

I sat down, as close to Wilson as I could get. I tried to keep my head down, my lips barely moving when I spoke. There was a six-pack of warm soda on the bench. I think I’ll always associate warm soda with Wilson. I took one, popped the tab and sipped; I could taste nothing. “You want one?”

“No,” he said bitterly. “Make yourself at home.”

“What a fucking idiot you are, Wilson. How did it ever come to this?”

“You should know. You helped me.”

“And by God I’ve regretted it ever since,” I snarled back at him. “You got me sacked, you moron. And since France, every nut job on the planet has me targeted, and my kids. We have police protection.”

“Don’t blame me. You chose to help me.”

I stared at him. “That’s called loyalty. A quality which you, entirely lacking it yourself, see only as a weakness to exploit.”

“Well, whatever. What does it matter now? Look, Jack, I need your help.”

“This is turning into a pattern.”

He glanced at his screen. “I need you to buy me time, to give me a chance to complete this project.”

“Why should I care about your project?”

“It’s not my project. It never has been. Surely you understand that much. It’s the Eaglets’ . . .”

Everything had changed in the three years since I had begun to run Wilson’s message through the big Home Office computers under New Scotland Yard – all under the radar of my bosses; they’d never have dared risk exposing their precious supercooled brains to such unknowns. Well, Wilson had been right. My data mining had quickly turned up recurring segments, chunks of organised data differing only in detail.

And it was Wilson’s intuition that these things were bits of executable code: programs you could run. Even as expressed in the Eaglets’ odd flowing language, he thought he recognised logical loops, start and stop statements. Mathematics may or may not be universal, but computing seems to be – my brother had found Turing machines, buried deep in an alien database.

Wilson translated the segments into a human mathematical programming language, and set them to run on a dedicated processor. They turned out to be like viruses. Once downloaded on almost any computer substrate they organised themselves, investigated their environment, started to multiply, and quickly grew, accessing the data banks that had been downloaded from the stars with them. Then they started asking questions of the operators: simple yes-no, true-false exchanges that soon built up a common language.

“The Eaglets didn’t send us a message,” Wilson had whispered to me on the phone in the small hours; at the height of it he worked twenty-four seven. “They downloaded an AI. And now the AI is learning to speak to us.”

It was a way to resolve a ferocious communications challenge. The Eaglets were sending their message to the whole Galaxy; they knew nothing about the intelligence, cultural development, or even the physical form of their audiences. So they sent an all-purpose artificial mind embedded in the information stream itself, able to learn and start a local dialogue with the receivers.

This above all else proved to me how smart the Eaglets must be. It didn’t comfort me at all that some commentators pointed out that this “Hoyle strategy” had been anticipated by some human thinkers; it’s one thing to anticipate, another to build. I wondered if those viruses found it a challenge to dumb down their message for creatures capable of only ninthorder Shannon entropy, as we were.

We were soon betrayed. For running the Eaglet data through the Home Office mining suites I was sacked, arrested, and bailed on condition I went back to work on the Eaglet stuff under police supervision.

And of course the news that there was information in the Eaglets’ beeps leaked almost immediately. A new era of popular engagement with the signal began; the chatter became intense. But because only the Clarke telescope could pick up the signal, the scientists at the Clarke Institute and the consortium of governments they answered to were able to keep control of the information itself. And that information looked as if it would become extremely valuable.

The Eaglets’ programming and data compression techniques, what we could make of them, had immediate commercial value. When patented by the UK government and licensed, an information revolution began that added a billion euros to Britain’s balance of payments in the first year. Governments and corporations outside the loop of control jumped up and down with fury.

And then Wilson and his team started to publish what they were learning of the Eaglets themselves.

We don’t know anything about what they look like, how they live – or even if they’re corporeal or not. But they are old, vastly old compared to us. Their cultural records go back a million years, maybe ten times as long as we’ve been human, and even then they built their civilization on the ruins of others. But they regard themselves as a young species. They live in awe of older ones, whose presence they have glimpsed deep in the turbulent core of the Galaxy.

Not surprisingly, the Eaglets are fascinated by time and its processes. One of Wilson’s team foolishly speculated that the Eaglets actually made a religion of time, deifying the one universal that will erode us all in the end. That caused a lot of trouble. Some people took up the time creed with enthusiasm. They looked for parallels in human philosophies, the Hindu and the Mayan. If the Eaglets really were smarter than us, they said, they must be closer to the true god, and we should follow them. Others, led by the conventional religions, moved sharply in the opposite direction. Minor wars broke out over a creed that was entirely unknown to humanity five years before, and which nobody on Earth understood fully.

Then the economic dislocations began, as those new techniques for data handling made whole industries obsolescent. That was predictable; it was as if the aliens had invaded cyberspace, which was economically dominant over the physical world. Luddite types began sabotaging the software houses turning out the new-generation systems, and battles broke out in the corporate universe, themselves on the economic scale of small wars.

“This is the danger of speed,” Wilson had said to me, just weeks before he wired himself up with Semtex. “If we’d been able to take it slow, unwrapping the message would have been more like an exercise in normal science, and we could have absorbed it. Grown with it. Instead, thanks to the viruses, it’s been like a revelation, a pouring of holy knowledge into our heads. Revelations tend to be destabilizing. Look at Jesus. Three centuries after the Crucifixion Christianity had taken over the whole Roman empire.”

Amid all the economic, political, religious and philosophical turbulence, if anybody had dreamed that knowing the alien would unite us around our common humanity, they were dead wrong.

Then a bunch of Algerian patriots used pirated copies of the Eaglet viruses to hammer the electronic infrastructure of France’s major cities. As everything from sewage to air traffic control crashed, the country was simultaneously assaulted with train bombs, bugs in the water supply, a dirty nuke in Orleans. It was a force-multiplier attack, in the jargon; the toll of death and injury was a shock, even by the standards of the third decade of the bloody twenty-first century. And our counter-measures were useless in the face of the Eaglet viruses.

That was when the governments decided the Eaglet project had to be shut down, or at the very least put under tight control. But Wilson, my brother, wasn’t having any of that.

“None of this is the fault of the Eaglets, Jack,” he said now, an alien apologist with Semtex strapped to his waist. “They didn’t mean to harm us in any way.”

“Then what do they want?”

“Our help . . .”

And he was going to provide it. With, in turn, my help.

“Why me? I was sacked, remember.”

“They’ll listen to you. The police. Because you’re my brother. You’re useful.”

“Useful? . . .” At times Wilson seemed unable to see people as anything other than useful robots, even his own family. I sighed. “Tell me what you want.”

“Time,” he said, glancing at his screen, the data and status summaries scrolling across it. “The great god of the Eaglets, remember? Just a little more time.”

“How much?”

He checked. “Twenty-four hours would let me complete this download. That’s an outside estimate. Just stall them. Keep them talking, stay here with me. Make them think you’re making progress in talking me out of it.”

“While the actual progress is being made by that.” I nodded at the screen. “What are you doing here, Wilson? What’s it about?”

“I don’t know all of it. There are hints in the data. Subtexts sometimes . . .” He was whispering.

“Subtexts about what?”

“About what concerns the Eaglets. Jack, what do you imagine a longlived civilization
wants
? If you could think on very long timescales you would be concerned about threats that seem remote to us.”

“An asteroid impact due in a thousand years, maybe? If I expected to live that long, or my kids —”

“That kind of thing. But that’s not long enough, Jack, not nearly. In the data there are passages – poetry, maybe – that speak of the deep past and furthest future, the Big Bang that is echoed in the microwave background, the future that will be dominated by the dark energy expansion that will ultimately throw all the other galaxies over the cosmological horizon . . . The Eaglets think about these things, and not just as scientific hypotheses. They
care
about them. The dominance of their great god time. ‘The universe has no memory’.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure. A phrase in the message.”

“So what are you downloading? And to where?”

“The Moon,” he said frankly. “The Clarke telescope, on Farside. They want us to build something, Jack. Something physical, I mean. And with the fabricators and other maintenance gear at Clarke there’s a chance we could do it. I mean, it’s not the most advanced offworld robot facility; it’s only designed for maintenance and upgrade of the radio telescope —”

“But it’s the facility you can get your hands on. You’re letting these Eaglet agents out of their virtual world and giving them a way to build something real. Don’t you think that’s dangerous?”

“Dangerous how?” And he laughed at me and turned away.

I grabbed his shoulders and swivelled him around in his chair. “Don’t you turn away from me, you fucker. You’ve been doing that all our lives. You know what I mean. Why, the Eaglets’ software alone is making a mess of the world. What if this is some kind of Trojan horse – a Doomsday weapon they’re getting us suckers to build ourselves?”

“It’s hardly likely that an advanced culture —”

“Don’t give me that contact-optimist bullshit. You don’t believe it yourself. And even if you did, you don’t
know
for sure. You can’t.”

“No. All right.” He pulled away from me. “I can’t know. Which is one reason why I set the thing going up on the Moon, not Earth. Call it a quarantine. If we don’t like whatever it is, there’s at least a
chance
we could contain it up there. Yes, there’s a risk. But the rewards are unknowable, and huge.” He looked at me, almost pleading for me to understand. “We have to go on. This is the Eaglets’ project, not ours. Ever since we unpacked the message, this story has been about them, not us. That’s what dealing with a superior intelligence means. It’s like those religious nuts say. We
know
the Eaglets are orders of magnitude smarter than us. Shouldn’t we trust them? Shouldn’t we help them achieve their goal, even if we don’t understand precisely what it is?”

“This ends now.” I reached for the keyboard beside me. “Tell me how to stop the download.”

“No.” He sat firm, that trigger clutched in his right hand.

“You won’t use that. You wouldn’t kill us both. Not for something so abstract, inhuman —”

“
Superhuman
,” he breathed. “Not inhuman. Superhuman. Oh, I would. You’ve known me all your life, Jack. Look into my eyes.
I’m not like you
. Do you really doubt me?”

And, looking at him, I didn’t.

So we sat there, the two of us, a face-off. I stayed close enough to overpower him if he gave me the slightest chance. And he kept his trigger before my face.

Hour after hour.

In the end it was time that defeated him, I think, the Eaglets’ invisible god. That and fatigue. I’m convinced he didn’t mean to release the trigger. Only seventeen hours had elapsed, of the twenty-four he asked for, when his thumb slipped.