Analog SFF, March 2012 (2 page)

I've been a Mac user myself for a long time, by choice; I recommend Macs to anybody who asks; and on the rare occasions when I've had to use Apple tech support I've been impressed by its quality and efficiency. But I find the sneering attitude implicit in Mr. Breen's closing remarks, frankly, offensive. He seems to believe, and to imply that Apple also believes, that users have some obligation to welcome a new tech just because its developer wants them to buy it, with little or no regard for what it's going to do to their ability to keep using old records. But if the hardware and software a person has is doing a good job of serving his or her needs, why should he cheerfully accept the “need” to waste time and money on an “upgrade” that makes his job harder rather than easier? If the old system still works, it's only a “zombie” because the company that made it chooses to treat it as one, hoping the user will feel obliged to buy a newer one.

That expectation seems to me a blatant case of misplaced priorities. Technology is to do useful jobs, not just to provide income for people who would like to sell us ever-newer versions of it. Information is special, and an “upgrade” that removes access to data we still need is no upgrade, no matter how many snazzy new bells and whistles it has. It is, to the extent that it does that, a giant step backward.

Copyright © 2011 by Stanley Schmidt

1 For an idea of what our lives might be like if automobiles had developed that way, see Christopher Anvil's story “Bugs” (June 1986).

2 This is not a new problem. I discussed it earlier in “Continuity” (August 1991), which was in turn inspired by a real news story about the difficulties the National Archives were having in keeping old documents readable.

3 For the non-Mac-users among you, Lion is Apple's pet name for yet another new operating system released near the time of the article.

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In recent years there has been much talk and concern about invasive species—and countertalk about whether “invasive” species are necessarily bad. Susan Forest leads off our April issue with a thought-provoking novelette about “The Most Invasive Species” and the elusive relationship between quality of intentions and quality of results. Craig DeLancey also has a novelette, “Ecce Signum,” which is the latest (and last?) in his series about “Marrion's Children,” bred and raised for a unique and very special quality—with, of course, the best of intentions.

Richard A. Lovett offers a fact article which is far out in the most literal way: It's about Pluto, recently demoted from official “planet” status, other Pluto-like objects, and all the other stuff making up the Kuiper Belt, way out on the fringes of the Solar System—but offering new insights into the origins of the part we live in.

We'll also have stories by Kevin J. Anderson, Stephen L. Burns, and Jerry Oltion, plus Part III of Robert J. Sawyer's novel
Triggers.

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Ancient history may be much more ancient—and more contemporary—than you think.

Karen Regan found me out in the parking lot, where I shouted orders at the security guards who carried bulging cardboard boxes onto the U-Haul. The guards ignored me. They had somehow figured out that all my authority had evaporated, and they were the type to switch in an instant from obeisance to contempt. They dropped my boxes roughly onto the hard steel bed of the truck, and shuffled off resentfully for the next cartons.

When I saw Karen coming towards me, her smart black pumps clacking on the tarmac, I suddenly felt very sorry that I had worn sweatpants and a hoody to work. It no longer seemed to announce that I was so hip and necessary that my clothes didn't matter. It seemed instead to just announce: unemployed.

"Hey, Worry,” she said. Worry was a college nickname that stuck for a few semesters, a consequence of my excessive studying. But for years since I had been just Steve.

"Ah,” I said, “now this really is the worst day of my life."

She frowned, hesitating, eyes flicking around as if looking for something.

But, just like in the old days, I never could bear feeling that she was uncomfortable. I broke the silence. “Your hair is short now."

"Has been for years."

"It's been years? You've managed to avoid me that long?"

She let that pass with an easy laugh. She still emanated that same charisma. Even standing on the pale old pavement behind the factory, she seemed a person with a direction, a person on her way somewhere, and you instinctively felt you'd be lucky to tag along.

She pointed at the boxes and said, “Moving?"

"I was fired, just fifteen minutes ago. These somber gentlemen, who used to show me daily deference, are now forcibly ejecting me. These boxes contain the swag of a thousand trade shows, which is all that I have been allowed to keep for myself. My files and my designs and my prototypes are property of the company.” I brushed my hands together. “What do you want, Karen? You picked a very bad time to show up again."

Her forced smile collapsed.

"How can you be fired? It's your company. You founded it. You're CEO."

The guards shoved the last boxes into truck. They turned away without salutation. I pulled the clattering door closed, then told Karen, “Most of it is owned by venture capitalists and they just decided that my microbots will be better weapons than surgeons. I disagreed. I was voted out."

She looked back at the factory building, from which I now was banned. The guards went through the steel exit door as we watched. They didn't even deign to look back once. I imagined them throwing the deadbolt after the door clicked shut.

"Sorry,” she said.

"So am I.” I fished in my pocket for the key to the rental truck, hanging from a dingy glow-in-the-dark keychain. I had to admire the cold calculation with which my company's board had prepared: the truck was rented and waiting here in the parking lot while they fired me. “Well, this reunion has been great."

"Wait.” She took a step forward. “I came to ask for your help."

"With what?"

"Something unbelievable."

"You coming back here is unbelievable. But here you are."

"You know I wouldn't come back here, to bother you, unless it was something . . . unless it was so big that you and I don't matter in comparison."

"Is there something that we did matter in comparison to?” I asked. Seeing Karen now only piled a sense of failure atop my sense of righteous anger. I really wanted to turn away. It would be nice if, this time, I was the one with the dignity and indifference. And yet, I couldn't help myself. Before she could answer my sarcasm, I added, “Tell me about it."

"I couldn't possibly.” She looked toward a silver Audi waiting on the pavement a few dozen paces away. “I'd have to show you. But it . . .” She sighed, then started over. “I know I haven't been a good friend these last couple years, Steve. But I need your help. And I promise you, I promise you, you won't regret it. I promise you that I can show you the most amazing thing you have ever seen. Only . . . I need to take a couple days of your time."

I laughed. “Yesterday that would have been utterly impossible. I wouldn't have thought I could spare a couple hours in the next year. So maybe this is your lucky day. Follow me home, let me change into something more dignified, and then tell me what you can."

"This is too long,” I told Karen, late the next afternoon, as she turned the car off the narrow paved road that we'd been climbing, and onto a pitted dirt track. We were moving slow enough now that I rolled down the window. Tall pines crowded the narrow way, and their scent quickly filled the car.

"I told you it would take a few hours to drive out here,” she said. The road narrowed to a path. The bottom of the car scraped over a root. An Audi coupe was not the car for this kind of driving.

"Yes. You did. But five hours is longer than I remembered. I've been working night and day on that start-up company for a year. Time is new to me. I've forgotten what it's like for it to shamble along."

She'd followed me home the previous morning, told me what to pack, and picked me up again the next day at dawn. I'd turned my phone off; an evening of sympathy phone calls from former employees and fellow engineers was all I could stomach. Breakfast on the road and a long drive had passed with us reminiscing about graduate school. But the whole time, she managed to deflect every question about the waiting surprise. She displayed impressive will power.

We came to the top of a rise, and she took the car out of gear. When it drifted to a stop, she jerked the emergency brake on.

"Is this it? The middle of a single-lane dirt road in the forest? We've arrived?"

"Almost. But first, I need your word of honor that you'll keep secret what I'm about to show you."

"Come on, Karen, this is too much. Whatever it is can't be that big a deal."

"It's the biggest deal ever. Now, come on, I'm not pulling out non-disclosure agreements and asking you to sign, even though I should. I'm only asking for your word."

I looked down the road, where it turned around some firs with branches nodding now in the September breeze. Karen was a paleontologist. The idea that she found something in the Adirondacks worth this much overture seemed ridiculous. I started to worry I was an easy dupe: first the venture capitalists make a fool of me, now my old love makes a fool of me. . . .

"Come on,” I said. “You find a dinosaur skull or something? Who would I tell about that? I don't know anyone who would care. But you have my word. Your cryptosaur bones are safe with me."

"No dinosaurs in here. The rock up in these hills is more than five hundred million years old. It's Ediacarian. What do you know about the Ediacarian?"

"Never heard the word before."

"It's an era. Pre-pre-Cambrian."

"Alright. So. Nothing around back then but bacteria, right? What do you call those colonies of bacteria? Stromatolites?"

"There might've been a bit more than that in the Ediacarian. Some complex structures that might be proto-animals, or at least unusually complex bacterial colonies, have been found in Ediacarian rock in Australia and Africa. Spongelike creatures."

"Okay,” I said, “so you found a big sponge?"

"No.” She opened the door, climbed out, closed it, and leaned down in the open window. She looked me in the eye a full ten seconds before she said, “I found a machine. A five-hundred-and-fifty-million-year-old machine."

I followed her down the narrowing path, our steps silent on the thick layer of soft pine needles. A wind had started. The path wound through an outcropping of smooth stone surrounded by bending pines, and then descended toward a narrow depression. I heard fabric snapping in the wind before I saw the tent. But then we turned a bend and before us, in a small clearing, a large blue tent stood by a black heap of campfire ashes. Shards of pale stone were strewn on the ground around the ashes and the tent. The clean, sharp flakes had no lichen on them: they had been chipped off of some other stone very recently.

Karen looked around, visibly relieved that no one was here. Then she zipped the tent flap up, and I stepped inside.

She had cut the floor of the tent away. At our feet lay exposed stone. The close air of the tent smelled of powdered stone and hydraulic oil, mixed still with the scent of pine. Most of the stone beneath us had been chipped away with precision jackhammers. It looked like she had been working to remove a sample, cutting a neat rectangle out of the bedrock.

But there, in the center of the square cut, something shimmering and gold stuck out of the newly exposed stone.

It looked like a flattened nose cone, sleek and smooth, about fifty centimeters long, and sticking about ten centimeters up out of the rock. I bent over and stared. Pale gold lines traced complex patterns on the surface. The patterns reminded me of a silicon chip, except that the lines crossed back and forth at every angle.

I stared for what seemed an eternity. Probably ten minutes. My mouth became dry, because I stood there so long with it hanging open. Walking down from the car, I had pictured some gray lines in stone that she was going to claim were the impression of a machine. I didn't expect something . . . intact.

"What is it?” I finally whispered.

"Old,” she whispered back.

"It looks . . . aerodynamic. Like it flew here and crashed."

"This stone has no signs of unconformities, no sign of being moved by an impact. This stone formed
around
the machine."

"We don't know that it's a machine,” I said.

"Oh, come on.” She pointed at it emphatically. “I grant that the Design Argument fails. But still, you find a watch on a beach and you know it's been designed. You find this thing in the rock, and you know it's been manufactured. This is not a fossil. It's not an organism, right? It's a machine."

It sure looked like a machine.

"How long have you . . . had this exposed?"

"Three weeks."

"And where's your team?"

"I had students working on the cut. There were surface features we wanted to pull out. But then their summer semester ended. By myself I pulled the stone that had rested on this. I used a winch. I thought I was just cleaning up. But instead I found this."

"Wow."

So her mind had been racing with the possibilities for weeks. And, I thought with a pang, it had taken her weeks to decide to come to me. Had she tried to get help from other people before getting around to asking me? Maybe some other past lovers?

Focus, I told myself. Try to bring some perspective. “It looks to be in excellent condition. It can't be five hundred million years old. Suppose it is a machine. Could it have . . . burrowed here?"

"There are no fractures. No cracks. No powdered stone. Nothing like that."

"Could it have . . . teleported here? Into the rock?"

"I . . . “ she hesitated, squinting in thought. “I didn't think of that. I mean, teleportation. That's kind of off the wall, right?"