Analog SFF, March 2012 (5 page)

"Crap,” I said, as wrap-up to my speech.

Within twenty minutes we were standing—our avatar robots were standing—where we had stopped the previous day: before the opening in the far wall where the train of boxes had come through. The room, as far as we could discern, had not changed. It no longer seemed that the “train cars,” as I had come to think of them, had something seething within.

"Our signal is still good,” Daltry said. “We should be able to walk into there without any problem for control."

"Let's go,” Karen said. She led the way.

We stepped over a narrow threshold. The “wall” separating the two spaces was thin. On the other side, the light was dimmer. I adjusted my controls until I could see better. Before us stretched a circular room; at our scale, the size of a small stadium. But it was empty. No geometric structures rose from the floor. Instead, the floor was formed of a scale pattern, radiating from the center of the room. And though lights shot through the walls and ceiling, as they did in the space behind us—and which we had started to call the “anteroom"—the floor had only a single light. A circle in the center of the room glowed pale green. Daltry set off toward it.

"Don't enter the circle,” I said. He reluctantly stopped at the edge, the black arms and torso of his robot leaning forward, as if straining to enter the circle.

"What do you think it is?” Karen asked.

"Maybe nothing,” Daltry said.

"I vote one of us steps onto it,” Karen said.

"Second,” Daltry said.

"All in favor say ‘aye,'” Karen said.

Both of them said, “Aye."

Before I could utter a sound, they were done with their mock parliament, and Daltry stepped into the circle.

The lights in the walls of the room changed, exploding into rainbow colors. Karen grabbed my arm and pulled me into the circle after her, as if she thought it safer there than outside.

We looked around, wondering what the change in the colors meant.

"Did you see that?” Karen asked.

"What?"

"Something streaked by, then faded. In the air."

As we watched, another colorful shape shot by, transparently blue. It looked like a graph—blue lines forming a tight network with blue spheres. The color darkened and then disappeared.

As we watched, more such figures appeared. Grids, geometric shapes, fluid dynamic forms. They were like dancing holograms, moving around the air above and around us, changing colors and fading into and out of view.

"It's projecting things. Information. Perhaps trying to communicate,” Karen said.

"What are the visual capabilities of these robots?” Daltry asked.

"A bit of infrared, a bit more ultraviolet. I can give them some artificial color and we'll about double our visible spectrum.” I pulled up a virtual keyboard and typed up the commands. When I was done, the number of figures multiplied in the air around us.

"Wow,” Daltry said.

"It doesn't know what we can see,” Karen said. “It's trying all kinds of spectra."

A pink grid floated by, the color of cotton candy, near the edge of the circle. Daltry walked over to it. The motion of the grid slowed and stopped.

"It sensed your motion,” I said.

Daltry reached out and touched it. His microbot's arm went straight through the light, of course, but instantly every colored shape in the room turned pink. And hundreds of pink shapes appeared with them. The whole space, above and around us, was crowded now with forms and things that looked like diagrams and graphs.

"It has determined that we can see this range of light,” I said.

"It
is
trying to communicate,” Karen said. She walked her bot over to stand next to Daltry. I followed.

"Wait a minute,” Daltry said. “Why would they have a planetarium inside the thing? Did they expect tiny visitors?"

I looked up. The ceiling of this space had a series of lines meeting directly above us. “I don't think so,” I said. “I think that this is a kind of projection machine. The ceiling opens, this unfolds outside. Look at the floor: it's like flower petals. They probably slide and can curve for focus. We set this thing off by entering the space."

"They're good engineers,” Daltry said, “if their machine works folded up or deployed, at tiny scales or large."

"I think we've established that they are good engineers,” I told him.

A vertex in the grid turned blue.

"Focus, geek boys,” Karen said. “Back to the task. Look at that."

Daltry touched the blue vertex.

The shapes all around us explode into a wide variety of colors.

"It just established some of the range of our visual acuity,” Daltry said. “Red to blue."

A pattern appeared in the grid: some of the vertexes turned blue, forming what looked like a random scattering.

We stared.

"Is this a puzzle?” Karen asked.

"I don't see any pattern here. If it's a problem of some kind, I can't see what it is."

Daltry nodded, the bug-head of the robot tilting forward and back. “I say we guess. If we fail, then if they programmed it even halfway decently, it'll dumb down its questions until we can answer them."

That was too speculative. “We could wait,” I said. “Pull off our helmets, check on the web, see if some mathematician somewhere could offer an interpretation."

"That could take days,” Karen said.

"I agree,” Daltry said. “I can't believe that they're smart enough to make this thing but not to have a self-adjusting interface. The fastest approach will be to interact with it now."

"But you don't know that it is an interface; you don't know that it's there for communication with you. Maybe that arms the weapons system. Maybe it vents the dilithium crystals."

Daltry touched the grid in the center.

The grid flipped over, and then the pattern changed. But nothing else in the room changed. We stared. The pattern was equally incomprehensible. After a long while, when none of us had an answer to offer, Daltry touched it again. Again, the flip, the change in pattern, and nothing else.

"I'm going to look at some of the other patterns. See if I see anything,” I said. Daltry and Karen followed me.

We spent an hour there, but none of the other patterns moved closer, our view of many of them was blocked, and nothing we could see had a clear interpretation as a puzzle or pattern.

Finally, in frustration, Daltry walked over to the grid again, and touched its center a dozen times in succession.

Behind us, a small and fast beat sounded out.

"What was that?” Karen said.

"I think we'd better look,” I said. We left the circle and headed for the door. After a few steps I could see through the portal. The small boxes, what I had called train cars, were not visible.

"They're gone. They—” I started to say, but then something slammed into my mouth. I started to choke. In the VR disorientation, I looked around the room, stunned and confused and expecting to see something striking the robot. But of course this was outside. My real body was choking.

I fell over. My robot, programmed to ignore extreme abrupt motions, stood motionless, staring at the doorway and the empty track beyond. I was suffocating. Something was in my throat. I wretched, feeling the need to vomit and unable to do so. Frantically I reached up and yanked violently at the straps to my helmet. I pulled it off.

The tent was still bright, though dimming in the afternoon. Karen stood before me, her helmet still on, convulsing. And, crowded around her mouth, four of the small boxes from inside the machine clung to her lips. A black gelatinous fluid oozed from them and into her mouth and nose.

I coughed. My throat was clearing. I slapped my hand across my own lips, and found it knocked away several of the small boxes. They were light, empty.

I could breath. I stood, and stumbled over to Karen. I knocked the boxes from her lips. She was choking, hacking. I tried to reach into her mouth, but whatever had gone in there was invisible, beyond reach.

She coughed, just as I had done.

"Oh god."

I pulled her helmet off.

"What . . . ?"

"The train cars.” I stumbled over to Daltry. But he had already taken off his helmet. His eyes were wet with tears from the force of his convulsions and coughing, but he looked otherwise healthy. He was holding cubes in the palm of his hands, looking at them.

"They must have—I don't know, flown over here and attacked us,” I said. “Affixed to us. They put something into us."

"Probes,” Daltry hacked. “They put their probes into us."

We waited a while, fighting off panic, checking each other for any obvious signs of side effects. I couldn't feel anything, although I tried so hard to search my proprioception that I started to feel itchy and hot all over. I forced myself to be calm—it was likely psychosomatic. Daltry just stared at the device, breathing, thinking. Karen paced.

Finally I said, “We need to get out of here. We need to get to a hospital. They've infested us. Whatever it is, they've infested us."

"No, no, Steve, please,” Daltry said. “Just listen. I'm—I've got an idea. Suppose I'm right. Suppose these things are software."

"You don't know if—"

"I think I do. It'd be ridiculous to send bodies across space, when you can just send minds. But I'm asking you to just entertain the hypothetical."

"Alright,” I said.

"Then what they just did is no different than what you and Karen and I are doing. They sent some probes into us. Into our . . . hardware. Just as we sent probes into their hardware. They're trying to understand."

"Who is they?” I asked. “Maybe there's no they. Maybe it's dead. An automated weapon. A—"

"Probes,” Karen said. “They're in us, right now, trying to figure us out?"

"Even if that's true,” I said, “our bodies are not planned amusement parks like that thing is. You apply pressure to our heart, move this or that neuron around, and we're dead."

"They should be smart enough to understand that,” Steve said. “Surely they can see we're evolved, not manufactured."

"Again with the ‘they.’ We don't know there's a they. And we don't know what they know, or want, if there is a they. They could be working up to replace our brains with, I don't know, cannibalistic chefs hoping to serve man. You can't confirm your hypothesis."

"But maybe we can confirm it by going inside again."

"This isn't about exploration anymore. It's about survival. We've got responsibilities to the human race, to our planet, to these trees even. This is Earth we're talking about now. We've got to tell the UN."

"Look,” Karen said to me. “If you're right to be worried, and these things are hostile, then we can't just stroll into New York City carrying a pathogen."

"So we call them,” I said.

"We call the UN, tell them we may be experiencing an alien invasion. And that we'd come ourselves but we may be pod people. Can you imagine that call?"

Right. It was obvious that even our closest friends wouldn't believe a phone call like that from us.

"We put it online,” I said.

There was silence. Neither she nor Daltry expected that. Even I didn't expect it. But slowly Daltry started to nod.

"That's perfect,” he said. “It'll take a while for people to figure out its real, to figure out what's going on, but we meanwhile give the information out to everyone, where it can't be bottled up."

He pointed at a stack of harddrives by his equipment. “I've been recording everything. Video and audio transmissions from each of the microbots to the VR suits, and video of this tent. It's all there. It'd really just be a data dump, to put it online. An hour and a half, I can have it all up. And I can have what we do from here on out stream to the web too."

"Do it,” I said. “Do it right now. Do it before we start hankering to eat brains."

He pulled on his pocket VR glasses, and started typing at a virtual keyboard. “Net connection is slow out here,” he grumbled.

"No maps,” Karen said. “No locations. Don't tell people where we are."

"Okay,” Daltry said.

"No, wait,” I told him, “we need some way to tell people where this is, if we . . . if something happens to us. Write a script that will post our GPS coordinates in . . . two hours, if we don't reset the timer. We can reset it every hour or so, to keep pushing the reveal back in time."

He nodded.

I looked at Karen. She was unhappy but she wasn't going to argue. At some point she had to know that this was going to get beyond her control. She couldn't keep the biggest find in history to herself forever.

"Perfect!” Daltry said.

"What?” Karen asked.

"I just got the URL www.ediacarianmachine.org."

"Not dot com?” I asked.

"What, you gonna sell T-shirts?"

Karen sighed at our dot geek talk. “No one is going to look at a website called Ediacarian machine."

"I'll post links to Boing Boing. I'm known there. I got cred. I'm thinking a quarter-million hits by morning."

"Oh god,” Karen said. “Let's think this over."

But Daltry was typing away at blazing speed. In this, at least, he was going to side with me. He believed, down to his spine, in openness. Karen would not sway him to hide what could be posted. I pushed outside the tent, leaving him to his work.

I was hungry. There must be something still in the coolers that I could make into a meal. I could bring Daltry some food while he worked.

Karen watched me make sandwiches, silent. Finally she said, “I think this is a mistake. People will figure out our location. They'll recognize me, for example, and then find out where my dig is located."

"People have to come here eventually, Karen."

"No. Not like this."

I looked up at her. Her mouth was pressed closed, eyes fixed with a steely gaze on mine. We stared at each other a moment.

Something inside of me shifted. Or deflated. She had always seemed so confident, so sure of herself and her plans, that it awed me. I'd wanted to come along. I'd wanted her to feel as sure of being with me as she was of her other goals. And the truth is that for five years, every woman I met seemed so . . . scattered, diffuse, in comparison to Karen. But really, maybe it had just been that other women were open to possibilities, and Karen was the one I wanted because she was the one I couldn't have.