Analog SFF, March 2012 (4 page)

"Yeah, yeah,” Daltry said. “Let's go.

I took a step forward.

And the lights came on.

Daltry whistled. “Man, it's got power. It as old as the oceans and it's got power."

We stood there, staring. I could hear Karen and Daltry breathing. Finally, Karen said, “It looks like a city."

I would have said it looked like a three dimensional circuit board, but once she said it I had to agree. “It does."

Before us a long line of lights stretched out into what, at our scale, was a distance like a city block. From this “floor” rose blocks of gold and white structures. Lines of light shot up and down their frames.

"Wait a minute,” Daltry said. “We've got signal in the low frequency bands."

"I thought you checked for whether this thing was transmitting radio when we set up the antenna,” I told him.

"I did."

"Okay,” I said. “Let's pause the mission and look at these signals."

"No way,” Karen and Daltry said simultaneously.

"It's not like we're going to just be able to decode them,” Daltry said. “We're here, the bots are set to walk, let's take a few steps."

Reluctantly, I did not argue. We moved another centimeter inside.

"You know,” Daltry said, “I've changed my mind. Karen can't be right. This thing can't be five hundred million years old. It can't be a thousand years old. Nothing, nothing could stay like this, in working shape, for that long."

As an engineer, I was inclined to agree. We stared at the complex structures and the traveling lights. They seemed . . . new, somehow. All the angles sharp, all the lights of equal luminosity. Matter just wasn't that resilient. Entropy always won, and won quickly.

"It's in the rock, and it's working,” Karen said.

"That's just evidence that it got into the rock somehow,” I said. “I agree with Daltry. Nothing lasts that long and keeps structural form."

"What if they had some kind of . . . field, or something, that reduced nuclear decay?” Daltry asked.

"A kind of stasis field? An anti-entropy field. Wait a minute. Karen, put your robot in neutral and pull off your helmet."

"Why?"

I called up and tapped at a virtual keyboard. In a few seconds I had what I needed.

"Do it. Then close the door to the device."

She did it. Her robot stopped moving, failing to emulate the small motions of her head in the VR suit. Then, after a moment, my view went black.

"Can you hear me?” I called out loudly.

"No need to shout,” she said. Now I heard her voice only through the muffled sound that penetrated my helmet, not over radio.

"Count to ten, then open the door. Then get back into your robot."

She did a countdown aloud. After “Zero!” my vision sputtered back as contact with the robots resumed.

"What did that accomplish?” Daltry asked.

"These bots have internal clocks.” I looked at the display. I'd synchronized and set side by side displays of the robot's clock and my suit's clock. “Twelve seconds lost."

Daltry said in a rush, “Oh my god we have to find that thing."

"What thing?” Karen asked.

"Daltry's right. There's some kind of stasis field, some kind of time-stopping-field, in this thing. That's how it lasted so long. When you shut the door, time stopped, or really slowed, in here."

"Or,” Daltry said, “this thing slowed the atomic motion that your robot's clock uses to measure time."

I nodded, making my robot's head bob. “It might just be, Karen, that you're right. That this thing is more than five hundred million years old."

We all just breathed a moment.

"I'm scared,” I said.

"Why?” Karen asked.

"This thing can stop time, or entropy. I can't imagine how that works but I'd bet it takes a lot of energy. And all that's in here too. This thing is dangerous. We should call in the government—"

"No way,” Daltry said.

"Okay, something, someone with more resources than us. MIT."

"Let's get in a team of choice people,” Daltry said. “People we know and trust. Get them to give us some real-time feedback."

"You're crazy,” Karen said.

"Better than bringing in some schmucks from MIT,” Daltry said.

"You're both crazy,” she said. “This is my show. We go on. Alone."

I took a breath. We could have this argument later. “Okay. A few more centimeters in. Then we stop, reconsider, and discuss next steps."

Daltry's robot stepped forward. Before us the lights formed what looked almost like a boulevard, with two lanes divided in their center by a narrow trench. I walked over to this trench and reached down inside. It had an inverted T shape.

"Maybe we shouldn't go any farther in,” I said, but it was too late: Daltry and Karen were separating, wandering ahead.

We searched the space. Relative to our scale, it was like an airplane hanger. The floor, the walls, the ceiling were covered with fine lines through which lights shot and flickered. The shapes, which I couldn't help but think of now as buildings, were all geometric solids. We followed the track or trench in the floor to its end at the far wall. The track went into the wall, which was covered with a pattern of geometric shapes and dots.

"It seems almost like a puzzle,” Daltry said. He reached out.

"Don't touch it!” I told him. But he had already pressed a rhombus shape, and a portion of the wall slipped aside.

"Something's coming!” Karen shouted. A glint of gold showed in the dark space beyond the gap. Sound at our tiny scale was strange: although amplification tried to respect the scale, sounds still came as somehow thin, tiny. Something rattled noisily toward us. We backed up quickly. That was an awkward motion, one that made clear how differently the robot walked compared to human walking—the feet gripped strongly and the robots scurried back quickly, causing a disorienting visual.

Through the new opening, a blur of motion came. It was over in a second. Before us, a long row of things like boxes lined up in a neat row along the track in the center of the space. They were probably a centimeter on a side, with a centimeter separating them. It looked, I suddenly realized, like a train. A train of cubes that had move faster than the eye to stretch from this new doorway to the entrance behind us. The trench or T had indeed been a kind of track.

We waited in silence. When nothing more happened, Karen took a step toward them.

"Please,” I said, “please don't touch them."

"No,” she said. “It's just . . . do you see motion in there?"

The boxes looked mostly opaque to me, their surface like the walls in the room: like a gold etched silicon chip. But I stepped closer and, as I watched, it did seem that, dimly visible, something twitched below the surface.

"God that is frightening,” I whispered.

I looked up the row. “These things are aimed at the door,” I said. “We're getting out of here, now. We're going to close the door. And we're going to think this through."

For once, they didn't argue with me.

I was disoriented when I pulled the helmet off. It seemed I was still in the VR. Then I realized the sun had set and it was dark in the tent. We'd spent so much time that day preparing the suits that our short hour in the device had taken us to sundown. Karen closed the door of the device. As my eyes adjusted, I took the rest of the suit off, and then pushed outside the tent.

The sky was still blue, but darkening. The forest was full of shadow, the sun far behind a hill—mountain?—to our west.

"It's starting to get cold,” I said to Karen as she came to my side.

"Don't complain,” she said. “You should see this place in black fly season. I'll start a fire."

"Isn't that my job?” I asked.

"Get real."

We roasted hot dogs on sticks. Daltry was appalled. We discovered he was a food snob of a ferocity rare, perhaps unique, to a coder. He hadn't eaten a hot dog—"nor processed food"—since he was a teen. Karen laughed at him and handed him a tube of mustard and a bun. Daltry rolled his chair so close to the fire that moisture steamed out of the damp wheels. Then he dutifully impaled his hot dog on a stripped stick, and thrust it into the flames.

I tried to get them to talk about the radio signals coming from the device, but they weren't interested. None of us had the skills really to analyze the output. And they were mesmerized now by the romance of exploring the machine. Staring at the signal seemed so pedestrian in comparison. “We can do that later,” Karen said.

"Alright,” I said. “Let's talk about the real issue. I think we need to go to the UN. We could drive there tomorrow. This is too big for just the three of us. This thing is old. It's extraterrestrial or extrasomething. And it's functional."

Karen and Daltry stared at me.

Finally, Karen's eyes slipped to Daltry. She gave him a pleading look. After a pause, Daltry said to her, “So tell me about this pre-Cambrian."

I had forgotten this about her. She had this way of winning loyalty—almost a sense of conspiratorial familiarity—from people she'd only just met. It had made me jealous, and eventually furious, when we were lovers. She could always make me feel the outsider, the one left out.

"Pre-pre-cambrian,” she said. “Ediacarian."

"Right."

"Well. Some paleontologists think it was an Eden. No predators had evolved yet. Just colony organisms. The oceans would have been full of colony organisms, different filter feeders floating about, with a few creeping alone the shallows as slow as slime mold."

"So our machine arrives, and things are a bit boring, and so it decides to wait for some intelligence to show up."

"We can't assume that,” I said.

"And,” Karen said, “it may have been on Earth a billion years already. I can only promise you the rock it's in is five hundred and fifty, maybe five hundred and sixty, million years old. I can't say how old that thing is."

"So what do you think it was meant to do?” Daltry demanded, squirting mustard on his hot dog. He bit into it with gusto. I resisted teasing him about it.

They talked through it for hours, even though there was really nothing to be said. We could infer nothing about the device's true age, its purpose, its origin. Daltry and Karen almost shouted at each other about whether it was a crashed probe or whether it had held—still held, Karen wondered—tiny organisms. Karen wondered if it had even seeded Earth; “We might be its children,” she said. Daltry laughed at both those possibilities, and explained that organisms were primitive “version 1.0 hardware,” doomed to stay on their planets.

"Space exploration belongs to software, woman."

Finally Daltry wheeled off to the tent that he and I were going to share. It was big, a four man, so that he could wheel inside and park his chair. Karen had a single tube tent set up near it.

Karen put her tablet computer on her knees and began typing.

"What are you writing?"

"Just notes.” She smiled. “We're immortal now, you know. We're the first explorers of the Ediacarian machine."

"Taking notes for the ages?” It came out more sarcastic than I meant it, but Karen did not rise to taking offense. Instead, she shrugged, still typing. “Better to form good habits from the beginning. I imagine I'll spend the rest of my life studying this thing."

That seemed delusional to me. I imagined that any day now this thing was going to be taken away from us by the federal government, if not New York State. It was on public land, after all. Instead of saying that, though, I just frowned.

Karen glanced up, and took that as a sign I was unhappy she was writing instead of talking to me. She set the tablet aside.

"So, you glad I brought you in on this?"

I nodded. “Perhaps. Partially. Yes. As odd as it sounds, I may even be glad that I was fired. Otherwise I never would have come up here. But I'm upset you two won't talk through the social implications of this—our responsibilities."

"We can learn a bit more before we have to settle anything. We know nothing yet. Come on, Worry, you know how this goes. No one in the world is going to know more about this machine than you and I and Daltry do. This is totally new here. So they'll take it away from us and then they'll stumble around. So why shouldn't we get to do the stumbling?"

I sipped at the tea we'd made. It was hard to deny that she was right about that. What bothered me was not some fear that we were not best suited to the task, but the idea that we were attempting to seize responsibility for something so important to the whole human race.

We stared at the fire a while in silence. I looked over to the tent I shared with Daltry. He'd turned on a light, and his silhouette showed starkly on the tent fabric as he lifted himself from the wheelchair and flopped down on his sleeping bag.

"Why did you leave?” I whispered to Karen.

She hesitated, eyes meeting my own. Then she looked back at the red embers of the dying fire. Such a long time passed that I thought she wasn't going to answer. I thought of other things I would like to say: things had been going so well when we were together; I had thought we were meant for each other; we could have been business partners; I had wanted to marry her.

But before I mustered the courage to say any of those things, she said, “I didn't love you."

"What?” We both knew I meant no question by that.

"I didn't love you. And I thought maybe you loved me. I thought it would be . . . cruel to stick around. It was getting awkward."

"Ah.” I opened my mouth. Suddenly I wanted to spit out something the opposite of what I had just meant to say: thank you very much for your heartfelt concern, or, I never even liked you much, or, you really did me a favor because I did so much better after you left. But I didn't manage to produce any stupid, sarcastic comeback before Karen said, “Goodnight,” and rose up from her seat. She disappeared into the dark, heading toward her tent.

"Just for the record,” Daltry said to me, a few minutes later when I crawled into our tent, “I don't love you either."

"Go to hell,” I told him.

I gave a long appeal, over a breakfast of tea and toast, for why it was selfish to make these decisions for the whole human race. Before I was even finished Daltry and Karen started suiting up.