“Since the Hatch opened.”
“Right.” Penny stepped back, subtly. “Sorry. Old habits die hard. Even after all this time. We always hugged, before.”
Earthshine watched this exchange with lively interest. “The ‘always’ applies to you, Penny Kalinski. To what you remember. But to your sister Stef, the ‘always’, the past before the Hatch incident, did not include you at all.”
“That’s right,” Stef said. “Lucky me. Suddenly I gained a sister.”
A look crossed Penny’s face, like the passing shadow of a defunct Heroic Generation sunshield. “And I,” she said, “feel like I lost one.”
“Fascinating,” murmured Earthshine. “Fascinating. But here we are standing in the heat. Please, come into the shade, both of you…”
The old building extended to several storeys and an underground extension. For Stef, the most striking feature of the ornate interior was a sweeping marble staircase down which the virtual projection of Earthshine marched with convincing footfalls, his shadow shifting in the soft lighting. “Once this was an Italian-owned bank,” he said, “but it has been put to many other uses over the centuries. Including a bookstore, when they still had paper books. A real historical relic…” Cleaning robots worked discreetly.
They reached a relatively small, cool, windowless, underground reception room, where Earthshine invited them to sit on overstuffed armchairs, and offered them water, American-style soda, coffee, from a self-service counter. Penny took a coffee, Stef a glass of water. The room was without decoration, save for a big block of what looked like sea-eroded concrete on one wall, maybe half a metre across, its deeply pitted face marked with a mesh of concentric circles and arrowing lines, apparently intentionally carved. Stef remembered a similar design on a brooch Earthshine had worn before. The peculiar item distracted her; it looked elusively like some kind of map, a schematic, but she could not have said a map of what.
“So,” Earthshine said, sitting with legs crossed, fingers steepled. “It’s good of you to have come so far to meet me—and to take a break from your work schedules, which I know is a sacrifice for both of you. Thank you too for agreeing to put up with each other’s company, at least for a short while. Welcome to my underground lair! Or one of them.” He smiled, with a show of apparently charming self-deprecation. “That’s how you think of us, isn’t it? Terrible old monsters, ruling the world from our furtive dens.”
Stef said, “I like to think we’re a bit more sophisticated than that.”
But Penny countered, “No, you got it about right.”
Earthshine grinned. “You contradict each other. In your talk, even in your choice of drinks. Whatever one does, the other must not follow. How fascinating. And yet by behaving this way you become ever more the mirror images that you each appear to reject…”
For Stef all this was picking at a scab. She snapped, “Is there a point to this?”
“Oh, indeed there is,” Earthshine said. “In fact your oddly coupled nature is what I primarily wish to talk to you about. I have followed your trajectories since that strange day on Mercury when the Hatch was opened. Well—you won’t be surprised to learn that. It’s what you would expect of me, isn’t it? To watch over you all, like some inquisitive god.” He leaned forward. “I have asked you here, you see, because I have learned something. I have found something.”
“Something to do with us?” Stef asked.
Penny said, “And what’s it to do with you, Earthshine? What do you want?”
“Well, that’s rather nebulous at the moment. Suffice to say—” He paused, as if choosing his words. “I want to stop being afraid.”
Stef stared at him, startled by that peculiar non sequitur. He’d said this calmly, his expression still, faintly artificial. Yet that, somehow, made it all the more convincing.
Penny seemed more aggressive. “You, afraid? Afraid of what? You’re an artificial mind stored underground in massively paralleled and distributed processor and memory banks, with your own dedicated manufacturing units and energy supply. You and your partners rode out the climate Jolts like they were bumps in the road, while millions of us died. What could you possibly be afraid of?”
“I will explain, in time.” He held out his hands. “I know this is difficult for you. But here you are, together. Would you like to talk?”
Penny and Stef looked into each other’s eyes, just as they had in that first moment of revelation in the Hatch on Mercury. Then they looked away.
At length Stef said, “I’ve done some research. On us, on our past.”
“I know. You’ve been doing it for years. My firewall traced you. I let you go ahead.”
“I saw the records,” Stef said. “As they exist now. We are twins, genetically identical. I am the older by a few minutes. We seem to have been close companions when we were small.”
“I remember,” Penny said more softly. “I wouldn’t need to research it. We played all the time.”
“We were put through the same schools by our father. We showed the same kind of aptitude, basically mathematical, logical, verbal. We both joined the ISF for the sake of scholarships that put us through grad school and sponsored our early researches, and enabled us to get access to the kernel labs on the moon.”
“The ISF split us up,” Penny said. “Their psychs thought it would make each of us more self-reliant. Still we did the same training and development, more or less, just in a different order.”
“But our careers converged again, when we started working on kernel physics.”
Penny said, “It all came from that day we were on Mercury with Dad, we were eleven years old, when the first hulk ship was launched. That was what inspired us to go into kernel research in the first place.”
Stef closed her eyes, just for a moment. No. I was there alone. With Dad. You weren’t there, not even as some unwelcome ghost. That was my day, not yours…
“And then it was all fine until we went into the Hatch on Mercury,” Penny said sadly. “I went through first, Stef. You followed me in. And when I went into that second chamber, and I turned around and you saw me, I could see you didn’t recognise me. We’d only been out of each other’s sight for a minute—”
“Less than that,” Earthshine said. “I have studied the record. Thirty-eight seconds.”
“And my memory is different,” Stef said. “I went alone into the Hatch. I opened the second hatch. There was Penny, already in the next chamber.”
“Before that time, you, Stef, clearly knew your sister. Afterwards you were baffled by her very existence, though you did your best to conceal it when you realised that something was very wrong.”
Stef felt resentment flare. “You’re not allowed access to any material on kernel physics. That’s a UN law.”
“Of course,” Earthshine said smoothly. “But any such law needs a defined boundary. And I, or my legal advisers, push assiduously at that boundary. Wouldn’t you? I am entitled to explore the implications of kernel science, even if I must turn my head away from the physics itself. A visual record of events at the Hatch tells me little about the underlying physics, and much of it is in the public domain anyhow.” He leaned forward. “Major Kalinski—I mean, Stef. Only you remember how it was before. Your life as an only child. Yes? Most people therefore assume your memory is faulty.”
Stef said, “Or that exposure to the Hatch messed with my mind and sent me mildly crazy.”
He shook his head. “But that’s not what you believe, is it, Major? Now consider the alternative. If your mind hasn’t been tampered with—if your memories are authentic—”