Mission: Tomorrow - eARC (13 page)

Continuing further out into our solar system in our next tale, a wife nursing her comatose husband and his wealthy employer have a first encounter just off Jupiter in . . .

ORPHEUS’ ENGINES

by Christopher McKitterick

If everyone helps to hold up the sky,

then one person does not become tired.

—Askhari Johnson Hodari

Nina Galindo gripped the frame of the porthole, its dome just large enough to fit her head and shoulders, and gazed down upon Jupiter. Jupitershine lit her face and puddled orange shadows along her clenched jaw. She felt a slight windswept sensation as JoveCo Way Station rotated, as if the carbon-nanotube eggshell floor were being yanked out from under her feet. Only a thin layer of technological wizardry protected her from the choking vacuum and flesh-frying radiation of high-Jupiter orbit. A swirling yellow storm tore through tan and brown bands. In those clouds, thirty thousand kilometers below, billions of aliens were shouting in unison,
Go away!

They were also saying something else, something much more complex, which even her most-powerful decryption algorithms couldn’t decipher.

Nina looked away from the unforgiving planet and crossed her husband’s cramped quarters to his bed. She took Mike’s hand. The skin felt cool. His eyes were shut and his face was too relaxed, devoid of his characteristic grin. During his months of induced sleep, even the deep concentration lines between his eyebrows had smoothed. His head had been shaved smooth for the treatments. Tubes as fine as silk strands sprouted from his scalp like a shock of hair. Shaped and sized like a soccer ball sliced in half, the AI-coupled device she’d carried all the way from the Mayo Clinic fed him a cocktail of viruses and nanos programmed to heal his damaged nervous system.

Doctor Else Arnasdottir slipped her interface tablet into a deep coat pocket and gave Nina a gentle smile.

“The repairs are coming along as expected,” she said. “We’ll soon know if he’ll make a full recovery, or if he’ll need to go to Earth for more aggressive treatment.”

“Thank you,” Nina said.

“I only plugged Mike into the magic box of healing,” the doctor said.

Nina shook her head. “You’re the one who kept him alive for almost three hundred days since the accident. Thank you.”

Arnasdottir’s smile grew. She nodded and patted the device. “I just wish we’d had one of these on-site then.”

“Life-saving equipment is
price-prohibitive
,” Nina said.

Mike had loved Jupiter all his life and dreamed of one day living here, so of course he signed up when his long-time boss founded JoveCo. The station harvested Jupiter’s near-limitless hydrogen to power fusion engines that delivered resources from the asteroid belt to Earth and the Moon and Mars colonies.

Behind them, the door opened. Don Williams paused in the entryway. Nina studied his reflection in the porthole ultraglas. Inverted by the shape of the bowl, his reflection appeared supersized, floating still and quiet among the stars, a vampire waiting to be invited inside. Here stood one of the wealthiest people in history, the man who had poured his immense fortune into building JoveCo, his monument at the edge of inhabited space. Williams had been Mike’s employer since the early days at Embedded Solutions, and joined him here when JoveCo opened for operations. And Williams was now, unimaginably, her boss, too. At least until she cracked the alien message or Mike woke up, whichever came first.

Nina closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, slowly exhaled.

“Thank you for coming, Nina,” he said.

“I had to bring medical equipment,” she said, “and take Mike home.”

“We’d have sent him back with the fusion torch’s return run,” Don said.

“I needed to be here if something goes wrong.” Nina swallowed, hard.

Williams cleared his throat and made an expansive gesture. “I’m sorry. This is my fault.”

“Just take me down
there
”—she pointed out the window—“so I can do my job and we can go home.”

The doctor excused herself and headed toward the door.

“Else,” Williams said, “hold on.” He turned to Nina. “You don’t have to descend. An AI could run your test.”

“I spent my trip out here—nine miserable months in a ship that stank of melting plastic and ozone—trying to decipher this” —she waved at the display—“
whatever
it is. Hell if I’m going to let danger keep me waiting for a task-rabbit’s report. I’ll leave when Mike’s ready to go, whether or not we solve your puzzle.”

She tossed her tablet and her AI-interface device into her satchel. “Let’s go.”

Williams nodded. “First, I want Else to introduce you to one of the natives.”

Williams gave Nina an impromptu tour as he led her around the station’s toroidal habitation ring. She met a handful of others as they passed living quarters and meeting rooms. They all knew who she was, the first newcomer to JoveCo Way Station in two years, since the torch-ship crew’s last visit. She shook hands and accepted wishes for Mike’s speedy recovery, wondering who might have been his friends, who might have stayed up late talking with him about one day walking among the stars, the dream Don Williams had woven from vacuum and cloud to lure them here.

They stopped near a heavy door marked with a biohazard symbol. The hallway here smelled a bit like cat pee. Williams opened a nearby closet and withdrew three sleek spacesuits. He handed one each to Nina and the doctor, and began slipping into the third himself. Except for a cylinder of hardware attached to the silvery back, it didn’t look all that different from what her students at the university found fashionable a few years ago.

Nina held it up and asked, “Is this necessary?”

“Jovians have ammonia for blood,” said Arnasdottir, “which mostly boiled away to toxic fumes when we brought it aboard. Couldn’t keep the operating theater cold enough.”

She hung her coat in the closet. “The stomach is a sack of oily strands,” the doctor said, pulling her spacesuit over pants and short sleeves. “Smelling the other organs would make you vomit. Or worse. We won’t enter the same space as the specimen, but . . .” She made a face. “Just in case.”

Finally, she pulled the suit’s transparent hood down to the collar. As she sealed it with a swipe of a finger, it inflated into a helmet, providing a gap of a few centimeters around her head. As Nina and Williams did the same, Arnasdottir fetched her tablet, then led them into a glass-walled airlock. Lights in the room beyond revealed a six-meter-wide pile of what looked like lumpy brown Jell-O poured over finger-width black hoses.

The doctor tapped her tablet against the glass, summoning a green-bordered interface the size of the wall. She touched a bright crosshair with both index fingers, slid them apart to zoom in on the specimen, then did something to enhance contrast between clumps, strands, and tubes.

“The underbelly of a Jovian,” Arnasdottir said.

Nina frowned at Williams. “How does your idealism mesh with hunting aliens?”

“We collected these remains after a Beanstalk-clearing run,” he said.

“You mean, after you burned it off,” Nina said.

“Since Mike installed the warning beacon,” Williams said, “no locals have been harmed.”

Nina had read Mike’s report. She knew her husband well enough to guess what he left unsaid. If Mike hadn’t parsed the aliens’ surface-level language and used it to broadcast
Fly away!
in their language, how many more Jovians would Williams have murdered to keep the hydrogen flowing?

Arnasdottir pointed. “These porous tendrils—grown from sulfur and organic compounds—lead to the stomach, here.” She traced a glowing path along a thin tube to a lump uncomfortably similar in size to a human torso.

“Judging by what I found in this guy’s gut,” she said, indicating a portion of the body held open with dissection tools, “they ingest hydrocarbons, pretty rare in Jupiter’s primordial soup. Which is why they chew the Beanstalk—it’s grown from carbon-nanotube and aerogel. You’ve seen vids of living specimens?”

Nina nodded. “Glorious.” She pictured this deflated creature in its natural environment, a fragile soap-bubble soaring among endless clouds. Skin like stained glass, translucent except for dark red ink-blot markings. A forest of tendrils draping many meters beneath.

“In the atmosphere’s upper reaches,” Arnasdottir said, “some inflate larger than this station. No restrictive bones or cartilage. Adults mass about three hundred kilos, mostly concentrated here, in the underbelly.” The doctor-cum-xenobiologist encircled the flesh in a green halo, then turned an excited face to Nina.

“What most blows me away is that their cells use
DNA
,” Arnasdottir said, “like us, like every other Earth creature.”

Nina whispered, “The universal programming language of life.”

“At least in our Solar System,” Williams said.

Nina shot him a neutral expression.

“Check this out,” Arnasdottir said, zooming in on a tiny bronze-colored knob. “I love brains; they’re my specialty—well, before I became JoveCo Way Station’s GP.”

Nina smiled. “I’m glad you’re the one working with Mike.”

The doctor nodded slightly. “His brain is a bit more complicated. This one’s structures are similar, but Doc—my AI—counted about a thousand neurons connected by twenty thousand synapses, thirty thousand gap junctions, and six thousand neuromuscular junctions.”

“Don’t we have billions of neurons?” Nina asked.

Arnasdottir nodded inside her transparent helmet. “I wouldn’t have thought it capable of language. Except evidence says otherwise.” She shook her head. “Check this out.” She traced a fan of threads extending from the bronze pea. “These neurofilaments spread across a substrate of hydrocarbon goo lining the skin. It’s a biological radio array that connects them with billions of others more intimately than we can, even with radical cybernetics. It’s as if they think with a single brain.”

“Mike’s hypothetical ‘Jupiter-Mind,’” Nina said.

Arnasdottir nodded. “Which tests support,” she said. “They form a planet-spanning brain potentially smarter than our most powerful AIs.”

“Our probes pick up
Come eat!
signals pulsing across at least a thousand kilometers around regions rich in carbon compounds,” Williams said, “and
Fly Away!
around storms.”

“Then there’s the whole-planet signals,” Arnasdottir said.

“Like the one I can’t crack,” Nina said, staring in at the dead thing spread open in the room beyond, silent and alien.

“Bingo,” Arnasdottir said. She counted on her fingers:

“At the local level, Jovian flocks make baby talk.” Arnasdottir raised a second finger. “At a larger scale, sometimes transmitting across the entire planet, we have mostly random signals, sort of like autistic jazz.”

“Except for the planetwide
Fly Away!
” Nina said, “which Mike interprets as them telling us to leave.”

“Warnings don’t mean much if you can’t back them up with force,” Williams said.

“We’ll ask Mike about that, when he wakes up,” Nina said.

“We recovered most of the data from his last descent,” Williams said. “The Climber was struck by lightning from a passing storm.”

Arnasdottir turned to Nina and raised a third finger.

“Radiating uniformly from everywhere Jovians live, every 42 seconds at low power, we find the largest transmission by far.”

“Which uses the strongest encryption I’ve ever seen,” Nina said. She shook her head. “If it weren’t coming from living creatures I’d say it’s a recording.”

“It’s as if the things evolved into a corner,” Williams said. “Their local signals make sense. They’re useful. Where’s the evolutionary advantage in the rest?”

“Evolution doesn’t have direction,” Arnasdottir said. “Advantage serves evolutionary change, not the other way around.”

Williams frowned, then indicated the Jovian. “We hope that it serves us soon. This jellyfish-brained thing is one component of the most powerful mind we’ve ever encountered. Imagine its possible utility after we decode their root language and shape it into a tool.”

Arnasdottir shut down the interface. The glass walls lost their enhancements, and the Jovian’s color and contrast faded to uniform gray. Nina felt a wave of melancholy.

As if reading Nina’s mind, the doctor said, “I need to check on Mike.”

“And we have tests to run,” Williams said.

They left the airlock, unsealing their helmets but keeping on their spacesuits for the trip ahead.

In a dingy kitchen that smelled of burned coffee—and the lingering aroma of ammonia—Williams filled a rucksack with hot-packs; one label read, “Squash and Carrot Stew.” He entered a code into a locked cooler’s display and extracted what looked like a wine bottle.

Williams saw Nina staring and grinned. “We have a tiny but flourishing vineyard on Ganymede. This is from our winery’s first batch, aged in a cask beneath the moon’s surface. Whole-bodied, good with stew.”

“You’re serious,” Nina said.

Williams nodded. “Dejen Gueye runs Ganymede’s logistics and farm operations, keeping JoveCo’s stakeholder-employees self-sufficient. He also prepares our meals. The man’s a culinary genius.”

Williams dropped the bottle into his bag, then led her to a spoke that connected the station’s outer ring to its hub. Opposite a ladder, the inside of the corridor was painted with amateur murals, mostly nature scenes from Earth. Nina grew ever lighter as they climbed toward the station’s axis, where she felt nearly weightless.

She recalled vids of the place: The Beanstalk pierced the hub’s center, running from the tanker docked at the station’s anti-Joveward side all the way down to the planet below. As they pulled themselves through the long cylindrical room, a hum resonated within the chamber and her chest like a great oboe. Handholds attached to the pipeline’s protective mesh vibrated not unlike the hydroelectric dam’s big pressure-relief pipe near where she grew up. Channeled along the skin of the pipeline, Jupiter’s immense electromagnetic field powered the station and the shields that protected it from radiation.

At the bottom, Williams entered an airlock. “Time to put the helmets back on,” he said.