“No…” Toby put two fingers on the screen and zoomed in. “Look there—at the center…”
Aeons ago, before the planet was ejected from the star system of its birth, this might have been an ocean shoreline. On one side of the circular white area, the surface was perfectly flat; on the other, hills and rugged canyons meandered into what looked like continental interior. It looked weirdly like someone had thrown a giant white paint bomb across the landscape—yet at its center …
Black lines, perfectly straight, crisscrossing each other. Dark rectangles and perfect circles, some tiny, some hundreds of meters across.
A city.
Toby zoomed out and then in on another of the white patches. It also radiated out from a mesh of black lines and dots. He guessed that the others would, too.
“Cities.” Sol grinned tightly at Miranda. “Saved, who would have believed it? Just gotta … get the comms working…”
But she was frowning. “Where are the lights?”
That was true—there were no windows glowing down there, no greenhouse dome lights to keep the eternal darkness of interstellar night at bay. Toby ventured, “Maybe they’re underground? A subsurface ocean? Can we look at this in infrared?”
Sol grunted and made some adjustments. The image flickered into false color—bright blues, whites, and mauve. “The colors show differences in temperature to a tenth of a degree or so,” he said. The city structures were barely distinguishable from the frozen landscape surrounding them. And the ambient temperature was about the same as Sedna’s: a balmy three degrees above absolute zero. Cold enough to turn water ice hard as granite, freeze air, and make any life or mechanical motion impossible.
“Dead,” Toby mumbled.
Sol breezily waved a hand. “It’s the find of the century, Tobe! We just gotta find out where we are and phone home…” He was flipping through diagnostic windows, trying different things, but Toby could see exactly what those windows were saying.
“Sol … Sol, stop! The engines are dead!”
He glanced back. “Yeah, but—”
“They’re dead. The bots kept them alive just long enough to put us in orbit here. They’re not coming back. And … we’re nowhere near home, are we?”
Sol shrugged and started to say something, but Toby had finally had enough.
“Stop!”
Both of his companions turned to stare at Toby.
“Drop the personalities,” he said. “Just tell me what’s going on!”
In a more level voice, Miranda said, “Even if we got a message off to Sedna—and we doubt we have the power—this world is uncharted. It must be so far away from Sedna, they could never mount a rescue mission. The ship’s clocks have been affected so we can’t tell you how long it’s been…”
“We’ve got enough power to cycle the hibernation system one more time,” Sol added, his voice equally calm. “We can set it to go into deep dive. A controlled freeze, so we don’t have to leave it to chance about when the power fails totally.”
It was true, then. He was dead. He had been ever since that meteor had hit the ship. This time—a brief waking above a planet that was also dead—was just a last spasm of the ship’s systems.
Even if he’d had engines, this little ship wasn’t designed to land on big worlds. The nearest craft that could do that were back at Sedna. This was a comet runner, incapable of landing near one of those frozen cities. He was stuck in orbit.
There were only two choices now: stay alive as long as possible, eking out a few last days and hours as the lights dimmed and interstellar cold wormed its way through the walls, finally to freeze to death as the ship’s power failed; or voluntarily enter the cicada bed, surely never to awake again, and end it all now.
He looked from Sol to Miranda. Their faces were blank, no longer full of that optimistic energy they’d had a few moments ago. Of course it was gone, he didn’t need that from them anymore. In fact, he no longer needed them, either.
“You’re no good to me anymore,” he said. “Switch off.” They nodded, and their faces disappeared from the open ovals of the two space suits. Those faces had been projections in his augmented reality glasses anyway. What was left in the suits were the intertwined grippies and butlers that had moved their arms and legs to make it seem like there were people in them. Sol and Miranda—companion personalities that were really just game characters from Consensus—were gone.
Now there was complete silence, and the solitude came crushing in on Toby. Fine. He wanted to be true to who he was, and where he was, if these were his last hours. No more simulated friends to share the moment with; no more softening the reality of it.
He grabbed his suit’s helmet. “Get the bed ready,” he told the ship. “I’m gonna take one last look around.”
With no audience to witness it, he felt no urge to cry. But there was no way the last thing he’d see would be just a picture on a screen. He climbed out onto the ship’s hull and looked down at the mysterious planet with his own eyes. There was nothing to see, of course, just a black cutout interrupting the stars. The stars, though … they really were beautiful.
He turned around, staring, and then around again. If this were the online world of Consensus, something would appear to save them all—a rescue ship, an alien artifact—and it would appear right … about …
Now.
He held his breath and waited. The moment dragged on.
“Toby?” It was the ship, speaking for the first and last time in its own flat voice. “Your bed is ready.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, then said, “All right. I’m coming.”
Two
WARMTH AND SOFT BLANKETS cocooned him. Toby wanted to burrow deeper into them to escape the light, and he did. For a while he lay in timeless bliss, unthinking. Then …
Then he shouted and flung the blankets aside, and sat up. He stared around, unable to believe what he was seeing.
He was in a big four-poster bed in a … well, not exactly a sumptuous bedroom, but a decent one, with tall windows that let in the amber-red light of sunset or sunrise. A soft breeze, somewhat chilly for a virtual world, teased the sinuous drapes.
For a moment he wondered. This couldn’t be real, but why then that chill in the air, the cracks in the plaster by the window? He touched his face, but he wasn’t wearing glasses. You could implant the visual and auditory interfaces, of course, but the metal and electronics had different thermal characteristics from flesh: they and hibernation technology didn’t mix well.
But this had to be a simulation—somewhere in the Consensus Empire he’d built with Peter. If he were in reality back on Sedna, he’d be waking in some drafty plastic cell somewhere. Not to open windows and what looked like a truly gorgeous sunset.
He examined the room again. All the styles seemed familiar, reminiscent of the subdued Art Nouveau and Space Modern mix he and Peter had favored for the Consensus Empire. The patterns on the drapes weren’t entirely alien, either … but maybe he was just imagining things.
There was a dressing bot at the foot of the bed, waiting patiently for him to wake up. It wasn’t holding out clothes, at least not with its front arms. Instead, it was offering him a pair of leg exoskeletons, the sort of mechanical assist you gave to people who weren’t used to the higher gravity of places like Earth.
The bots in the online worlds never did that sort of thing, because nobody ever pretended that their world had gravity different from Earth normal.
Toby threw his legs over the side of the bed and knew that this was no simulation. His feet crashed to the floor of their own accord, nearly taking the rest of him with them. He had to brace himself against the cushions as an invisible force tried to suck him down. Gravity—real gravity.