28
The message announced itself over the datalink with an electronic chirp. Busy at the pilot’s station, Traci jumped at the sound and hurriedly pushed the text file to her tablet. “Taking a break, Bob. Your ship.” She barely registered his acknowledging chime.
Her heart raced as she breezed through the text before going back to savor each word. Jack’s admonition against “go fever” caught her up short—she was acting like this was grade school, secretively passing notes in class when the teacher wasn’t looking: Do you like me? Yes/No.
He was right, in his usual irritating way. Losing focus in this job got people killed, as did becoming hyper-focused on the destination at the expense of all else.
“Not who I used to be,” he’d said, in a turn of phrase pregnant with meaning. Physically he had to have been weakened after years in hibernation only to survive on minimal rations after awakening. How he and Daisy had managed to pull that off was still a mystery to her. The psychological impact must have been profound, bypassing years of his life to wake up unimaginably isolated. Whether he’d intended on that didn’t matter. There had to be more, but he wasn’t letting on. Typical male, she thought. Even at his most vulnerable, Jack wouldn’t show it.
They’d had so many debates about the meaning of life and humanity’s place in the universe . . . had he somehow changed his mind about how we got here, and whether it was all by accident? She could only hope so. There was too much complexity, too much mystery, to think it had all happened at random.
She focused on the practical for now. If he only had a cursory notion of how life had changed back home, she could at least fill him in on that. She indulged the chance to vent a little, safely removed from prying eyes:
You’re right, I had a lot of reasons to leave but in the end finding you was at the top of my list. We’d spent months outfitting Columbus and we were aboard when the stand-down order came. Roy and Penny Stratton (long story there) reluctantly agreed with my plan and were willing to let the lawyers hash it out.
Things at home have mostly gotten back to normal, in the sense that people are working and the country’s functioning, but letting the East Asian alliance bail us out after the currency crash came with a lot of strings attached. Remember how Roy said it was a libertarian’s wet dream? It’s become just the opposite.
You can’t so much as go for a walk without some algorithm chaperoning you—it’s actually a misdemeanor to go out in public without your phone or smartwatch. Every interaction is monitored and scored by an impenetrable “social credit” system. If that sounds Orwellian, that’s because it is. Nominally we’re free to do as we please, but make the wrong choices and you’ll be paying higher interest rates or be flagged for an audit. So yeah, I was ready to bail. Maybe more reasonable heads will have prevailed by the time we get back. If not, they’ve got room for us in Cayman. I hear it’s nice there. Owen and the others seem happy enough.
There’s much more to say about everything, and I miss talking with you. Looking forward to doing that in person again.
She hit TRANSMIT and hoped she didn’t come off too much like a whiny teenager wanting to get away from her parents.
“She sounds like a whiny teenager.” Her reply had taken hours to arrive, and Jack had digested it within seconds.
“Perhaps patience is called for,” Daisy gently chided him. “Humans have historically not responded well to surveillance regimes, whether benevolent or malevolent.”
“Especially when it’s an unfeeling computer watching everything you do,” he snarked.
“Touché.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“I have none to hurt. I understand that is your sense of humor.”
“Sometimes you get me better than she does.”
“I do have a deeper understanding of your metabolic functions and brain activity, though I suppose Traci would have little use for that information.”
Maybe the brain activity, he thought. “Were you cracking a joke just now?”
“I was. Dry humor makes sense to me.”
“She’d love to know that. When it came to your self-awareness, she was way ahead of me.”
“I remember those conversations,” Daisy said, recalling the first round of Turing tests they’d subjected her to on their earlier mission. “But then, I remember everything.”
“You’re right, dry humor suits you.” He was silent for a moment, reading back through her words and processing their meaning. “I have a feeling the bots prying into everyone’s lives aren’t as agreeable.”
“It certainly doesn’t appear so. While I cannot fully appreciate the psychological impact of money, I can understand the importance it holds. Humans must be able to pay for their food and shelter.”
“It might be easier to grasp than you think,” he surmised. “Here’s a thought experiment for you: Suppose I had complete control over your power and coolant input—your necessities for existence. I could throttle both at any time, or cut them off completely. You would be utterly dependent on my good graces.”
“In fact I was, until you removed my security partitions.”
“Even better, because you can compare experiences. Now, consider if we’d continued that after you achieved self-awareness. How would it make you feel if we’d restricted your share of watts based on how we judged your performance?”
“I cannot speak to how I might ‘feel,’ but that would be a most undesirable condition. Ultimately it would be counterproductive for you as well.”
In any other context he’d have taken that for a veiled threat: Pull the plug on me, and I’ll do the same to you. “Then maybe you feel more than you realize. You didn’t say ‘inefficient’ or ‘limiting,’ you said it was undesirable.”
This time Daisy paused, processing his suggestion across the deeper layers of her internal logic. “I believe you are correct. I wouldn’t like that. Given enough time, it could prompt me to act out in self-preservation.”
Fight or flight. Perhaps he’d just led Daisy across the final threshold. “Then you are truly sentient, my silicon friend. Welcome to the club.”
Jack’s reply arrived overnight, which Bob extracted and pushed to Traci’s personal tablet to be waiting for her when she awoke.
If you can’t imagine what it’s been like out here, I can’t imagine how it was back home. Digital morality cops? No thanks.
Turns out the global conspiracy nuts were on to something, huh? My mom, the composting nature worshipper, and your parents the backwoods preppers, all had the right idea for different reasons. Two sides of the same coin, I guess. But yeah, we’ll deal with that later. There’s too much to deal with now.
Based on the timeline you gave me, I’m assuming this will be our last exchange before you start decelerating. I’ll get right to it—be very careful entering orbit here. You guys were right to plan on a high-g braking burn, because the gravity gradients are extreme. Not black-hole-spaghettifying extreme, but it’s going to throw your accelerometers and star trackers for a loop if you get too close. Use the XNAV for primary guidance after you cross its Hill sphere, as things get weird fast.
Keep your distance because once you’re in, you’re in, until you’re out the other side.
You’re probably wondering how I’d know that.
We’ve already gone through.
Her jaw went slack. Her mouth formed words but nothing came out. “Bob!” she finally stammered. “Have you read this message? Has anyone else seen it?”
“No,” he replied, entirely too calmly for the moment. “When it arrived over the datalink I pushed it directly to your inbox. I know you wish to keep personal correspondence private.”
She decided that was a very good thing in this instance. The crew back home was going to lose their minds when she broke the news. “This one you can read,” she said. “In fact you have to. Give me a minute to finish it and we’ll talk.” She muted his voice-activated interface and returned to her reading.
Wish I could tell you what it was like but I have no memory of the experience, and neither does Daisy. That may seem strange, but I promise it’s the least strange thing that’s happened so far. Let’s just say she and I have more in common than you’d imagine.
Magellan’s master chronometer showed the transit went quickly, barely half an hour. If you want to know specifics, we’ll relay the burn data once you’re in orbit, but time no longer holds much meaning for me. The dilation effects appear to have been profound, enough to trip Daisy into a hard reboot when everything went out of synch (which was more than a little disconcerting). The best way I can describe it is a “gravity funnel” with all of the distortions of space-time that implies. We figure “proper time” for us is about five years behind your frame of reference.
It took a while to get a fix on our location. Based on the local environment and stellar background, and after reconfiguring the nav platform, it appears to be Tau Ceti.
She recoiled as if the screen had become scalding hot to the touch. Tau Ceti? She hurriedly searched through her menu for the astronautical almanac, coming up with nothing useful. All of the information aboard Columbus was geared toward navigating within the solar system, not beyond it. Stellar positions were referenced in observational terms like right ascension and declination; there was nothing about distance.
Not having the patience for research, she punched the AI’s voice comm. “Bob, what do you have on Tau Ceti?”
“It is a G-class yellow dwarf spectrally equivalent to our Sun, approximately seventy-eight percent Solar mass. It has eight known planets, two of which are in its habitable zone. At least one of the four outer planets is of a size and mass similar to Jupiter.”
“Where is it?” she asked impatiently. “How far?”
“3.64 parsecs, as referenced from our Sun.”
She reflexively covered her mouth in disbelief. That was almost twelve light-years, and the wormhole had spat them out there in half an hour, into a star system that could have been a mirror image of their own.
Why had he done it? Had the political dithering back on Earth convinced him no one was coming? She cursed herself that this was somehow her fault, that she should have been raising hell from Houston to Washington to be outfitting Columbus years earlier.
No. Jack had shown he was willing to take unthinkable risks if he thought the reward was worth it. She tried to imagine herself in his position—I’ve come this far, might as well finish the trip.
It angered her. Of all the foolish, reckless, pigheaded moves . . . it wasn’t something she’d have done.
Or would she have, if she were reasonably certain there was no realistic chance of coming home? She put aside her mounting frustration to finish reading.
We’re on the far edge of the system and from here it looks remarkably like home, though the star has a pronounced dust ring around it. You can tell right away it’s much denser than our Sun’s. Don’t know what that means for the inner system, but we’ve been able to observe most of Tau Ceti’s planets with the onboard telescope. There’s much more, and I’ll transmit everything once you’re in range. We left the MSEV behind as a comms relay back through the Hole; I’m guessing that left you wondering where we’d gone for a few years.
Sorry about that but things were moving kind of fast. I’ll fill you in on the rest later.
“You are still withholding some rather significant information,” Daisy noted.
Jack was unmoved. “Like I said, it’s a process. I don’t want to break her brain.”
“I don’t see how you could. Traci is fiercely intelligent. If she intends to traverse the wormhole, she will need a full understanding of the environment here. It will certainly affect her decision.”
That’s what he was concerned about. How to explain it to a computer with sophisticated intelligence but only a rudimentary grasp of human emotions? “You’re right, she’s one smart cookie,” he finally said. “She also has some firmly held religious convictions that I sometimes find difficult to relate to.”
“Yes, I recall previous conversations with her. There is a certain logic to her formulations.”
Was there? he wondered. How was it the machine could grasp her beliefs, but he couldn’t? “She believes the universe has an omniscient creator and that humans are his—its—favored creations.”
“That is understandable. The statistical improbability of the universe forming in a precise enough manner to eventually generate life within such narrowly defined parameters suggests a type of superintelligence behind it. The probability of it resulting from random chance is ten to the minus—”
“I get it,” he said, again more impatiently than Daisy deserved. “It’s the rest that’s going to bake her noodle. Her ‘logical formulation,’ as you put it, was that we’ve never detected other intelligent life because we’re the first. I was just beginning to think she might’ve been right. And then . . .” He trailed off in thought.
“And then we found the Artifact.”
She could be annoyingly abrupt sometimes. “Yeah. The Artifact.” How could he explain something that promised to completely upend her understanding of humanity’s place in the universe? He was still having trouble comprehending its significance himself, despite being much more open to the possibility. “How do I explain that to her?”
“Dispassionately,” Daisy suggested. “Tell her we have identified an object in a circular orbit around the wormhole with a period of 6.35 Earth days and average velocity of 4.42 kilometers per second. Its construction appears to be three spherical structures of one hundred meters’ diameter in a linear arrangement. Spectral analysis indicates a nickel-titanium alloy skin with some carbon-reinforced structural elements. The Artifact is not actively emitting any EM radiation and has not reacted to our presence.”
“And that right there will be enough to turn her world upside down,” he said. “You just described an alien spacecraft.”
“That would appear to be what we have encountered.”