Helena duPont-Vonessen
Daphne Glaucus-Worthington-Smythe
Yevgeny Bogolomov
Wu Chang Xi
Hamish rocked back, turning to Lacey. “Socrates weeps! What are those people doing here?”
“You mean my peers from the First Estate?” she asked, using terminology that had been briefly fashionable in the 2040s and 2050s. “Come now, Hamish. Who do you think helped pay for all this?” She waved skyward, clearly meaning the entire crystal vessel. “The space factories. The giant laser? Most of the members of the Oligarchic clade accepted the doomcasts-the dire outcomes predicted by their pet boffins and farcaisters. They wanted lifeboats from a world apparently fated to fail. A lot of lifeboats.”
“But…” Hamish recalled those long-ago days when he used to fawn over oligarchs-then decades spent fighting and denouncing them. “But slots were supposed to be allocated by-”
“By merit? Yes, well.” The woman offered a ladylike shrug. “A lot of them were. In the end though, the institute decided that there’s plenty of room.”
“Plenty of… say, how many uploaded minds are aboard-”
Before he could finish the question, his tru-vus answered: 8,009.
“Eight thousand and… but I thought there was limited storage capacity for full-scale minds!”
Now the Oldest Member spoke for the first time since they arrived at the control center.
“This crystal vessel is larger than average. It has many times the normal volume. Nor is that the only difference.” Om gestured ahead, in their direction of travel.
Hamish could sense their conveyance decelerating. Already, the sky-ceiling seemed to be curving inward again, as the probe’s cylinder shape tapered at the aft end. Soon that terminus came into view. Only it wasn’t what Hamish expected.
He had figured the scene would reveal familiar constellations of brittle-pinpoint stars, with an especially bright one dead center. The still-bright sun that shone on Earth. And also, possibly, the stunning glare of the propulsion laser.
Instead, beyond the curved end of the crystal, Hamish saw a huge, flat wall of very dark brown, blocking any view in that direction. He shook his head.
“I’m confused. What the hell is that?”
Lacey nodded sympathetically.
“Here, allow me.”
She touched the side of her head. Then, with the same finger, she reached up and tapped his tru-vus, which erupted with a simple illustration.
“So… what I’m looking at is a great big box that’s attached to the rear end of our ship?” Hamish shook his head. “That’s not standard design, is it? I mean… the smaller compartment at the front is there to control the sail. But what the heck is all that for?” He motioned at the brown wall blocking their view toward home.
“We’ve speculated about that,” commented the Oldest Member. “Some of us believe that it contains instrumentalities to increase our chance of success, when we reach our destination.”
“What, you mean tools? What kind?”
“The implements might include signaling devices, to better announce ourselves to a local species. Or telescopes to study them.
“Or else, perhaps the container comes loaded with weaponry, in order that we should be better able to protect ourselves. Say, in the event that we find the new solar system infested with malignant, old-era probes.”
“Well, anything that improves our…”
Hamish halted, feeling a sudden thrill of realization. His fingers made a satisfying snap, even in this virtual realm.
“Of course! This has to do with the Cure. The box must contain bioreactors and genetic codes and artificial wombs and all the things we’ll need at journey’s end, in order to start turning ancient data into living, organic beings!”
That had been Emily Tang’s great plan-a scheme she came up with after learning about a long-dead seeder ship, discovered in the asteroid belt. A Mother Probe whose colonist-children were murdered about the same time as the dinosaurs. The Seeder itself represented an obsolete way to spread biological sapience around the galaxy-a shortsighted and self-centered approach, doomed in this more dangerous era.
But it sparked Emily’s big idea.
Why not use the same kind of technologies to resurrect a few of the artilen species that we find locked inside ancient probes? Sapient races that are long extinct-vanished from the universe. Today, their only remnants are software shadows trapped within crystal eggs. But might it be possible to bring some of the original species back to life? Or creatures who are close to them, both physically and culturally? Restoring them as living organic beings, here on Earth?
And if we can do that… why not start with those who prove their friendship first?
The very idea had been enough to shatter some of the viral-fomite alliances. The offer provoked some of the virtual artifact entities to experience surges of unexpected nostalgia for their original maker-selves. Long-dormant sentiment for living creatures who once strode in the open, breathing air, interacting directly with the cosmos, building dreams and hopes that were all their own, under naked suns.
“You would do that for us?” they asked. “Even knowing what we are? What we tried to do?”
To which humanity replied:
“We’ll not be doing it for you, but for your ancestors, the earlier versions of your species, who made you. And for your living descendants.”
When the first resurrection experiments bore fruit-when a few alien infants were born out of artificial wombs and adopted by human families-virtual envoys in scores of artifact probes abruptly brought forth secret treasures. Stretches of genetic code that they had hidden away, in copy after copy, information buried for ages deep within crystal lattices. For them, an older loyalty suddenly trumped their Darwinian self-interest as bits of “viral” data. And they were more than willing to pay the required cost.
The truth. Or as much of it as they could pry loose from the other fomite beings. Those still desperate to promote the plague.
So successful was the program-with dozens of species of alien infants now being raised in nurseries, crèches, and private homes across Earth, adding to the diversity of what it meant to be “human”-that a notion began spreading around the planet, intensely assertive, brash, even messianic.
Why not teach this?
If the method works for us… to cure the plague through acts of potent generosity… then might it work for others out there, too?
Hamish felt certain. This had to explain the extra-large cargo compartment at the rear of their vessel.
“It must contain tools to work the Cure! Machinery to start the process in our new solar system.”
It came as a disappointing blow when Lacey shook her head.
“I have to doubt that, Hamish. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t make much sense.”
“Why?”
“Because no mere box a meter long could contain any of the devices you describe. And the genetic codes are all imbedded here”-she gestured around them-“in the data lattice of our ship.
“Anyway, remember, the plan starts by helping a young alien race with all phases of their development crisis. Teaching them to stand up and think for themselves and to resist other crystals that pose as ‘gods,’ for example. To not view us as gods! And other vital things like ecology, using sustainable technology wisely. Plus the vital tricks of reciprocal accountability and positive-sum games…