THE ATACAMA
THE FEMALE SIM ESCORTED ETHAN TO THE chamber where, she said, the hive conducted the first steps of its swarming. To Ethan it looked like an anonymous factory floor: a wide, low-ceilinged space, noisy with machinery, lit by banks of buzzing fluorescent tubes.
He had expected something more conspicuously strange. But he guessed this prosaic space made sense. The hypercolony was exploiting human technology, which was why its breeding ground resembled a factory. It was a factory: a factory devoted to the manufacture of nascent hypercolonies—or of the organisms that would parasitize them.
Ranks of laboring simulacra parted before the cart like a sea, and Ethan was assaulted by the stink of green matter, the concentrated essence of the hypercolony, a toxic amalgam of freshly-mown hay, ammonia, acetic acid. “In this room,” the sim said, “the hypercolony assembled what you might call spaceships, though each one is small enough to hold in your hand—a dense core of living cells, in a shell designed to protect the contents from dispersion and radiation and steer them toward a target star on a journey of many thousands of years. Once the payload arrives in a hospitable solar system the cells will be released to do what they do naturally: use carbonaceous and icy orbital bodies as a resource for making millions and eventually trillions of copies of themselves. These daughter cells then gather into a diffuse orbit around any rocky, watery planet with a potential for evolving complex life. When and if a suitable civilization arises, they engage it and exploit it to repeat the cycle.”
Telling him these things, Ethan thought, was a subtle assertion of power, as if to say: We have nothing to fear from you. Even with this knowledge you can’t hurt us. But it was also a bid for understanding and maybe something more than understanding… surely not sympathy? Could these creatures actually expect sympathy from him, when he had counted the cost of their life cycle in the corpses of people he had loved?
“But we are not the colony,” the sim insisted. “You wrote in The Fisherman and the Spider that a parasite is always a simpler organism than its host, if only because it doesn’t have to duplicate the function it steals from another. And that’s true of us. The cells we’re assembling into these vessels aren’t designed to reproduce themselves on the surface of asteroids and planetesimals. They’re designed to attach themselves to colonial cells already present and to usurp their function.”
We are not the entities that murdered your friends and family, in other words, and so Winston Bayliss had also said. It was a claim Ethan could neither accept nor reject. It might or might not be true.
“That is to say, we have a parasitical relationship with the colony. But we also inherit its symbiosis with animal cultures and its means of reproduction. That’s why we need to prolong this colony’s existence for a few more years. And that would be a good thing for you, for your family, for human civilization.”
Ethan doubted that his skepticism escaped her attention.
“You once wrote that symbiosis succeeds because it’s energy-efficient. Each organism in a symbiotic relationship relies on the other for some function it can’t perform itself. That’s perfectly true. The colony by itself can’t mine or refine ore, can’t construct the tools it needs to propagate itself. And the human species, like most such species, finds it difficult to suppress its own self-destructive tendencies. Together they can do what neither can do alone.”
The cart passed through the assembly room into another featureless corridor, this one leading more steeply upward. The eye-watering stink of green matter faded. Ethan caught a whiff of fresh air, mingled with a moist updraft from the warrens below.
“This facility is literally the sine qua non of the hypercolony we now control. If it were to be damaged beyond repair, the entire colony would cease to function. Not gradually, but at once and forever. You have to consider the consequences of that.”
The cart turned a corner, and as they approached the surface Ethan saw a patch of sky. Night again. He felt irrationally disappointed that he wouldn’t feel the sun on his face again before he died. And of course he would die. He had been told too much. He wouldn’t be allowed to carry this knowledge back to the human world. He could only assume that the colony would kill him once he refused what ever bribe or threat it ultimately offered.
They reached the surface not far from the flower-shaped structure that was the heart of the installation. A central pillar supported a dozen highly polished metallic petals: a steel and glass tulip, seen from an ant’s perspective. Human simulacra swarmed around the base of it, and Ethan thought he could see a few of the six-limbed creatures moving in the iron lacework around the petals, sailors in the rigging of a nightmarish sailing ship.
He shivered in the night air. The female sim opened a compartment under the cart’s seat and pulled out two plastic windbreakers, one for her and one for Ethan. As a sim she was indifferent to discomfort—why bother with the jacket? But he guessed shivering was a waste of physical energy, easily enough prevented.
She drove to a higher vantage point. Apparently something was about to happen, something she wanted him to see. She parked in an elevated clearing almost as tall as the surrounding berm, next to an abandoned and partially-disassembled backhoe with its arm and bucket raised in a frozen salute. The steel lotus loomed in the near distance, lit from below and reflecting moonlight from its highest places.
She gave him what he supposed was meant as a searching look. “The Correspondence Society arrived at a reasonably accurate understanding of the relationship between the hypercolony and human society. But you never really asked yourselves what would happen if that relationship broke down.”
Not true. During his seven-year sojourn in backwoods Vermont, Ethan had given the question much thought. Of course the consequences might be dire. In the long term, a return of humanity’s demonstrated penchant for bloody war. In the short term, a prolonged and catastrophic failure of the communications grid, a disaster that would cripple vital functions in every nation on Earth.
“War,” she said, “is an obvious possibility. You inferred that the colony has intervened in every developing conflict since the Great War. And that’s true. Without replaying history I can’t demonstrate how much could have gone wrong for human beings in the last century. But even now, the Russians and the Japanese are fighting over oil ports in the Sea of Okhotsk. Neither side can get any traction in that conflict, precisely because we’re manipulating electronic communication even as the warring parties struggle to encrypt it. Our thumb is on the scales, you might say. But suppose we ceased to intervene. Isolated artillery exchanges could easily escalate to formal war. With war, mercantile shipping would be threatened. Peripheral nations would be drawn into the battle. Ultimately, one side or the other would win. But at what price? Lives and resources spent and a legacy of mutual distrust that would invite other, even bloodier wars. Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity. Alternatively, if the colony’s influence were to be gently withdrawn, institutions like the League of Nations might have a chance of averting the worst outcomes. But if the colony dies to night, large-scale bloodshed is inevitable in both the long and the short term.”
Possibly true. Probably true. Who could say? Ethan was tempted to tell her she was wasting her breath.
He was distracted by a vibration that seemed to come from underground, a seismic grumble, a high metallic whine.
“That’s the power generators ramping up. What you’re about to see is the launch of a seed vessel. Look: you can see the carrier at the center of the beam antenna.” She was talking about an acorn-shaped pod poised at the center of the petals. “It’s driven by a beam of quantum-coherent light. The light strikes the mirrored underside of the vessel and creates a superheated gas, a plasma. There’s no need for a rocket or any such clumsy devices. The beam can lift only relatively light cargo, but our cargo isn’t massive. Moisture in the atmosphere could diffuse the beam, which is one reason why we launch from the Atacama, where the atmosphere is thin and arid. You’ll need these, Dr. Iverson.”