Orphans of Earth Read online

  Orphans of Earth

  Sean Williams & Shane Dix

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  eISBN: 978-1-61756-447-5

  Copyright 2003 by Sean Williams and Shane Dix

  Published by E-Reads. All rights reserved.

  www.ereads.com

  Dedication

  For Simon Brown,

  fellow boggler.

  Adjusted Planck Units – Time

  Old Seconds

  NB: For more information about Planck Units, see Appendix 1.

  Adjusted Planck Units – Distance

  Old Meters

  WHAT CAME BEFORE...

  2050 A.D.

  The United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program dispatches 1,000 crewed missions to nearby stars in an attempt to explore terrestrial worlds identified by Earth-based detectors. Instead of sending flesh-and-blood humans, UNESSPRO crews each mission with simulations called engrams that are intended to behave as, and function as though they in fact are, the original scientists. A core group of sixty surveyors is duplicated many times over to cover all the missions.

  In each mission, UNESSPRO plants a single control crewmember who has been altered to ensure the crews follow strict operation guidelines. These controls unknowingly possess directives that come into play when certain conditions arise. One of them is to immediately contact Earth should any evidence of extraterrestrial life be discovered. Twelve years after the missions are launched, all transmissions from Earth cease. Without explanation, Sol System falls silent. Cut off from UNESSPRO, the missions continue as planned, hoping that whatever fate befell the home system will not follow them also.

  2163 Standard Mission Time

  Aliens come to the system of Upsilon Aquarius in the form of giant golden spindles that build ten orbital towers around the Frank Tipler’s target world, Adrasteia. When the towers are complete and connected by a massive orbital ring, the aliens disappear, leaving no clue as to their intentions or origins.

  Peter Alander, once a highly regarded generalist but now a flawed engram barely holding onto sanity, is sent to explore the orbital towers by the mission’s civilian survey manager, Caryl Hatzis. Within them, Alander finds AIs that identify the towers as gifts to humanity from a powerful star-faring civilization. The Spinners are secretive and mysterious, but their gifts are to die for: a detailed map of the Milky Way, featuring details of other alien civilizations; a surgery containing exotic medical technology, such as a perfectly transparent membrane designed to keep its wearer from harm; a means of instantaneous communication with a range of 200 light- years; a faster-than-light vessel that defies known scientific laws; and so on.

  The gifts are too much for the crew of the Frank Tipler. Testing the ftl communicator and the hole ship severely stretches the crew’s resources; a detailed examination of all the things they have been given will take decades. They need help. Amid a crisis brought about by the UNESSPRO control, Peter Alander decides to take the hole ship to Sol to see what has become of Earth. If anything remains of UNESSPRO, he will return with the resources they need or, at the very least, instructions on how to proceed.

  What Alander finds in Sol, however, is a civilization bearing little resemblance to the one he left. A technological spike shortly after the launch of the UNESSPRO missions, 100 years earlier, resulted in a war between nonhuman AIs that led, among many other things, to the total destruction of the Earth. A small percentage of humans have survived, in highly modified forms, to create a new society in Sol System called the Vincula. The post-humans regard Alander’s arrival with suspicion and some disdain, since engrams are now regarded as a very poor cousin to the sort of minds that have evolved from the ashes of Earth.

  A much-expanded form of Caryl Hatzis, the sole survivor of the original UNESSPRO volunteers, is pressed into service. Alander has disturbed the fragile equilibrium between the Vincula and its main opposition, the progressive Gezim. Confused by his reception, Alander tries to hail Adrasteia for more instructions but receives only silence in reply. As war breaks out in Sol System, the expanded Hatzis sends her original with Alander to Adrasteia, both to attest the veracity of his claims and to see what has happened in his absence.

  They arrive in Adrasteia to find the colony and the gifts destroyed. Something has swept through Upsilon Aquarius and erased all trace of the Frank Tipler. Stunned, Alander and Hatzis retreat immediately to Sol System, only to find the same thing happening there. A fleet of vastly superior alien vessels destroys the Vincula and the Gezim with equal prejudice, along with every last trace of humanity. All the resources and technology of the AIs can do nothing to stop the destruction. Within a day, there is little left but dust. Reeling from the double whammy, Hatzis and Alander retreat to the edge of Sol System to avoid destruction at the hands of these new aliens, the Starfish. The feeling that the gifts should have heralded a golden age of humanity only enhances their grief and shock. They have never been friends in any form, and the tension between them is not helped by the revelation that Alander himself may have inadvertently brought about the destruction of humanity. By following the hails of another colony contacted by the Spinners, they determine that the Starfish home is on the omnidirectional signals broadcast by the ftl communicators provided in the gifts. It was Alander’s attempt to call Adrasteia from Sol System that drew the Starfish to the Vincula.

  This pattern, they realize, will only be repeated as the Spinners sweep through surveyed space, dropping gifts as they go. Colonies must be contacted to warn them against using the communicators in a way that will bring the Starfish down upon them. A severely traumatized Peter Alander and the original Caryl Hatzis, very much alone without the rest of her distributed self, make it their mission to save what remains of humanity: the orphaned UNESSPRO mission engrams scattered across the stars.

  1.0.1

  Rob Singh

  EXCERPTS FROM THE PID (PERSONAL INFORMATION DIRECTORY) OF ROB SINGH, UNESSPRO MISSION 639, TESS NELSON (PSICAPRICORNUS).

  2160.9.02-03 Standard Mission Time

  Everyone has to have a reason to be. Mine, I think, is to appreciate the subtlety of the Spinners’ work

  Subtlety? From creatures that do in a day what humanity would struggle for decades to do? Who flaunt their technological superiority as we would wave a stick in front of a dog before throwing it to watch him run?

  Yes, subtlety. When we retrieve the stick, we find the hand that threw it long gone, utterly disinterested in whether we found it or not. There has to be something subtle at play there, or else the universe truly is incomprehensible—and that is something I cannot believe.

  The Spinners have been here for what feels like an eternity, and we have found no obvious explanation for their mysteries. So I place my faith in subtlety, and in my all-too-human inability to see it.

  For now, anyway. I guess I’ll just have to keep looking.

  * * *

  Hatzis has gone off to powwow with the bigwigs from the other colonies, and we don’t know when she’ll be back. That’s fine with me. She’s so damned strict about system resources. At least while she’s not here, I can fast-track to talk to people without inconveniencing them too much.

  Ali Genovese has been left in charge. When I spoke to her today, she looked tense. It’s understandable. Our current situation is more than a tad iffy. Psi Capricornus is smack-bang in the middle of the hot zone. If anyone’s going to be attacked by the Starfish, it’s likely to be us. And I’m not just being dramatic, either. Every broadcast brings news of another colony lost. Yesterday it was Balder; tomorrow it could be Inari. I feel like we’re sitting on t
op of a volcano.

  “I vote for firing up the engines and leaving the system,” I told Ali when she dropped by.

  “Leave Inari? You can’t be serious, Rob.”

  “We’re sitting ducks here. If they hit us, we’ll never get away. Not without the hole ship,”

  “Even with the hole ship, we probably wouldn’t get far,” she said glumly. “You heard what happened to Adrasteia.”

  Adrasteia was the first on a list of names I didn’t want Inari to join.

  “Ah,” she said then. “It’s because you’re bored, isn’t it? You want your old job back.”

  “Would you blame me if I did? There’s not much use for a pilot around here.”

  “You’re working on something,” she said. “I see your data flow. It’s all inbound, all about the gifts. Are you doubling up on our research, Rob?”

  “Tiptoeing across the cracks.”

  She pulled a sour face. “Sometimes I think there’s nothing but cracks,” she said.

  “Then I’m not wasting resources.”

  “No. You have my blessing to keep poking around.”

  She didn’t leave then, although she could have. I had what I wanted, and she had more important things to attend to. But she stood for a moment in the low-maintenance parlor I whipped up for guests, gazing idly into space. She’s letting her blond hair grow out—or presenting the illusion of growth, at least. I like it better that way, even though I can never tell what’s going on under it.

  Eventually, she blinked and returned. “Sorry about that, Rob. Got stuck thinking about home.”

  I nodded understanding. We all do, sometimes.

  1.0.2

  Lucia Benck

  2117.2.18 Standard Mission Time

  (5 November, 2118 UT)

  By the time Lucia Benck realized her friends were dead, the blue-shifted photons that had carried the news were already a month old. Although she fought to comprehend what the images were telling her, searching for the remotest possibility that her interpretation of the data could somehow be wrong, she’d had enough experience with distance and relativity to know this was no illusion that she could simply brush aside. Her powerful rejection of what she was seeing had more to do with not wanting to accept her impotence than not believing what she saw. She wanted to reach out across the vast gulf of space and time that separated her from her crewmates and warn them, to save them from the fate they had already suffered.

  Deep down, she knew there really was nothing that could be done for the Andrei Linde. All she could do was watch, accept, and consider what was to be done next.

  The first thing she did was return to Chung-5’s clock rate. During the approach to pi-1 Ursa Major, she had been gradually accelerating her perception of time from the deep rest she experienced between targets to something approximating normal. Even so, she had been severely behind at that point in the mission, experiencing barely one second for every ten of the probe’s. Once she was back in synch with the probe—albeit still dilated with respect to Earth and the Linde—she wouldn’t waste days pondering her options. She had the luxury of time, if not resources.

  The second thing she did was examine the data in meticulous detail. Could those flashes of light have been the signs of an accident? Was there any chance that the emissions encircling the planet were atmospheric disturbances? Could a sudden flare-up of pi-1 UMA have caused the things she saw across the system? But it was all just speculation, and the absence of any definite answers to her questions only frustrated her further.

  While doubt remained, her options were unclear.

  Prior to receipt of those images, her mission had been proceeding as normal—or as close to normal as she had decided to maintain, anyway. Chung-5 had been coasting headlong toward pi-1 Ursa Major, where the crew of the Andrei Linde had established a beachhead around the fifth world out from the primary star. She assumed that her crewmates had christened it with the name they had agreed upon prior to leaving Sol—Jian Lao—so this was how she referred to the planet in her own mind. Apart from that, she really didn’t know a whole lot more. The Linde and its crew had arrived almost exactly on schedule, Mission Time, seventeen months earlier. She’d seen the braking flare of the ship’ s atomic engines reflected off the planet’s moon and upper atmosphere, and she occasionally picked up faint echoes of carrier waves not aimed at her.

  With Chung-S’s main dish expanded as wide as possible, and with secondary baseline dishes spread out in a vast array around her, she had eagerly absorbed the data coming in from the target system. It boasted eleven major planets, six of them gas giants. Two of the giants had ring systems to rival Saturn’s, large enough to be just visible to her interferometers. She couldn’t detect asteroid belts, but she did discern a comet passing close to the sun, its tail impossibly faint against the deeper darkness of the background.

  As for Jian Lao itself, its emissions indicated an Earth-like world. In fact, as she watched it slowly resolve, she realized it couldn’t have been more like Earth. From the vaguest suggestions, she imagined its blue oceans and green forests, dreaming of the Eden she was giving up. As with all of the survey ships, the Linde had the capacity to build new bodies for its crew, and she pictured herself standing under an alien sky with the wind on her skin and Peter at her side. It was a reunion she longed for sometimes. How many other couples could boast surviving a separation of not only normal years, but light-years as well? It was hard not to want to complete the circle, to connect the dots.

  “The tourists outnumber the truth seekers,” he had said back on Earth, the night before their engrams had woken. She was a committed tourist, and she knew it; that was why she was riding a glorified rocket forty-five light-years away from home, alone. But there was a haunting, tempting truth to the image of her and Peter that was hard to deny.

  Then had come the flashes from around Jian Lao and its moon, closely followed by smaller disturbances across the system. Each flash had been brief but frighteningly bright, reminding her of an antimatter containment failure she had witnessed once, back in Sol. She’d watched the flowering of small pockets of annihilation across the system, thinking of the work the crew of the Linde would have been doing in the years since its arrival: the satellites that would have perhaps been placed around the moon and the nearest gas giant, and maybe even the solar poles to watch for prominences; the installations on Jian Lao itself; the geosynchronous orbit of the Linde...

  Christ. Geosynchronous orbit is where she would have put the Andrei Linde, and that was where the biggest flash of all, the first, had come from. If the flashes really were explosions, and if that first flash had been the Linde, all hope that she might ever stand in that Eden with Peter was gone forever.

  She was surprised by how much the thought hurt her, how much the dream had meant. She might not have intended to go back to him, but it had been important that he was out there somewhere, waiting for her. The source of such feelings had to be other than genetic—since she no longer had any actual genes—but she couldn’t rationalize it.

  UNESSPRO wouldn’t program the desire to reproduce into a machine, surely? Perhaps they would. She wouldn’t put anything past UNESSPRO. If they thought something would increase the chance of the missions succeeding, they’d probably do it.

  Whatever. The origin of her confusion was just a smoke screen for her deepest concern. Peter was gone, the need went unfulfilled, and she grieved. In the empty spaces of her virtual coffin—she had long ago dismissed all but the most basic conSense illusion in preference to the company of stars—she cried tears that felt real but weren’t.

  The truth sank in. She was proud of herself for not flinching. It would have been easy to switch off, metaphorically or literally. Instead she reexamined new data obsessively, looking for clues. Although the stray signals from the Linde had ceased with the flashes, there were other signals she couldn’t interpret. Over the course of a real-time week, drawing 100,000 kilometers closer with every passing second, she watched as nume
rous other energy sources flared and died with irregular rhythms across the system. The smallest of the rocky worlds disappeared; the infrared signature of one of the gas giants changed.

  She was too far away to tell who might be responsible. A hostile Earth government, perhaps, much advanced in the decades since the Linde had left Sol? The possibility that someone would break the light-speed barrier and beat them to the target worlds had been one seriously considered by the UNESSPRO bigwigs, but out here it was pure speculation. It could just as easily have been aliens. All she knew was that, whoever it was, their talent for destruction was startling, and the more she saw, the more nervous she became.

  Then, without warning, everything stopped. The energy flares faded and died; the small, rocky world reappeared, and the gas giant returned to normal. It was as though nothing had happened, as though everything she had watched had been an illusion, after all—or perhaps a glitch in her instruments.

  But there was one small difference: there were no longer any human signals coming from the system.

  “Okay.” She imagined herself pacing to and fro in a small room. “What have I got here?”

  Not much, she told herself. It looked like someone had flown into pi-1 UMA and blown up the Linde, but she had no way of confirming that.

  “And then what?” she asked herself.