Barnes: “Take it in, Elroy.”
The bus landed on the primary without incident and extruded the Post-its to hold it to the surface. As soon as the bus was secure, the crew began unplugging from the bus and to go on full internal suit support.
Barnes worked through the agreed-upon procedure: “Everyone stay together. Check your tethers. I don’t want anyone flying free. Nobody touch anything without my approval. Nobody armed except Emwiller, and make sure your weapon is safed, Sally. No other external equipment except for Sandy’s camera gear. Ready?”
They were ready.
“Then let’s go.”
They floated just above the regolith of the primary. As soon as they moved away from the bus, maneuvering with their suit thrusters, a line of glowing dots appeared on the regolith leading toward the rainbow target. The dots flowed toward the open port.
“Interesting,” said Hannegan, the physicist. “The surface doesn’t change, it’s like the light is moving through it. I’m guessing some kind of cellular automata or nanobots, they’re what’s making the lights. Nice. The ultimate programmable signage. You getting this, Sandy?”
“I am now.” Sandy was pointing his camera at the surface, cranked up to maximum magnification. In his viewfinder, he could see the surface was packed with speckles that brightened and darkened in a coordinated way. They reminded him of the chromatophores he’d seen on the skins of squids and octopi.
The crew floated through the open port into a white, cube-shaped chamber, large enough for a small orchestra. The door that was open to space was behind them, but there was a closed door in front of them. A green pad the size of a dinner plate was next to the closed door.
Barnes looked at Clover. “What do you think?”
“What does green mean, on traffic signals almost everywhere on Earth?”
Barnes shrugged, reached forward, and punched the button.
The door behind them closed and a light winked on Sandy’s camera: “George, I just lost the link back to the Nixon.”
Barnes tried calling the Nixon. There was no response. “The interior must be EM-blocked. Why am I not surprised? Okay, people, we are really on our own now. You follow my orders. You do what I tell you, when I tell you to do it. You do not take the initiative, not if you ever want to come back here again. We take everything slowly.”
Gas began venting into the chamber. When it hit one atmosphere, according to their suit gauges, the inner door opened. They moved forward, and somebody muttered, “Standard air lock…”
When they’d all entered the second chamber, the door behind them closed. The room was larger than the first, but not much, possibly ten meters long and eight wide, also a featureless white with diffuse lighting. The only item in the room was a stand-alone console toward the back of the room. A meter and a half high, it would’ve been impossible to miss even if the room had been as cluttered as a secondhand junk store: it glowed with flickering bands of rainbow colors and looked disturbingly similar to an antique jukebox.
Words appeared in the air above the console that read: “You can remove your helmets. The air is sterile and breathable to Earth standards and is maintained at 21 degrees Celsius.” In a few seconds, the words changed to Chinese ideograms, followed by Arabic and Russian, then a half-dozen other languages, before it cycled back to English. Barnes looked over at Emwiller and said, “Sal, I’m cracking my helmet. If I collapse, get everyone out of here, pronto. Shoot out the air lock if you have to.”
“Wait, wait, wait…” said Stuyvesant. “What if there are biologics in here?”
“That’d be another unnecessary mousetrap,” Clover said.
“They could be unintentional—”
“We haven’t seen anything unintentional so far…. I believe the air will be safe.”
“I’m going to unseal,” Barnes said. “Sally, stand by.”
They all watched as he unclipped the faceplate on his helmet and took a deep breath. And held it. And let it out and took another. He took a few more breaths and licked his lips, tasting the air, and finally nodded. He pushed the faceplate closed again, resealed it, and said, “The air seems to be okay, but I want everybody to stay sealed. When we get back, I’ll go into isolation to check for biologics. Let’s go to Post-its.”
They all reached down and threw switches on the legs of their EVA suits. When upward pressure was placed on a boot, a pressure switch would cut the electrical charge and the boot would peel away from the floor with about the same resistance as Earth gravity.
As they all stuck to the floor, or deck, or whatever it was, new words appeared over the polychrome console. “Please say something to me.”
“Speakers and mikes, now,” Barnes said, and they all went to external speakers and microphones.
The phrase repeated in the same other dozen languages they’d seen in the first message.
Barnes said, “Hello. We’re from Earth. Uh, the third planet in this system.”
Colors shifted across the sides of the alien console making it look even more like a jukebox, and then it spoke: “American English. I can speak in American English. Now, what questions do you have?”
Barnes asked, “Who are you?”
The jukebox said, “I am not a ‘who’ but a ‘what.’ I am a low-grade artificial intelligence tasked with answering questions. I am programmed to understand thirteen human languages, five of them based on the probability of being the first-contact languages. In order, the probability for first contact was American English, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and Portuguese. I am not a fully intelligent AI. I chain rhetorical logic via a statistical grammar. Though it may sound as though I’m being conversational, in fact I am always responding directly or indirectly to questions. My data storage has the answers to 71,236,340 explicit or implicit questions. I can synthesize new answers from those I am preprogrammed with, but at times you will ask questions for which I have no answer, to which I will reply, ‘I don’t know.’”
Barnes asked, “Can we set up camera equipment to record this conversation?”
“Yes. I will wait.”
Barnes nodded at Sandy, who’d had the mini-Red under his arm, recording first contact as clandestinely as he could. Now he broke three more cameras out of his carrying case and began setting them up in the bare room.
Clover asked the jukebox, “Are there any other species here now?”
The AI said, “No, you are the only species here at this time.”
Clover: “When are you expecting others to arrive?”
“I don’t know. That is not an omission from my database. There is no predefined schedule for arrival. Previous intervals between arrivals have ranged from two years to three hundred and ninety-six years.”
“Who made you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are your makers?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?”
“When they left, they didn’t tell me who they were or where they were going.”
“When did they leave?”
“One thousand seven hundred and fifty-three Earth years ago.”
Hannegan: “How old is this facility? The aliens… uh, the beings who recently left, they weren’t your makers?”
“This depot is 21,682 Earth years old, and I don’t know if the species that recently departed were my makers, because I don’t know who my makers were.”
Stuyvesant: “Can you tell us what the other species look like?”
“No. There may be some visual recording facilities on this depot, but I do not have access to them.”