How far out must we be by now, if even our own perfect building blocks have decayed so? How long has it taken us? How long have I been dead?
How long? It’s the first thing everyone asks.
After all this time, I don’t want to know.
He’s alone at the tac Tank when I arrive on the bridge, his eyes full of icons and trajectories. Perhaps I see a little of me in there, too.
“I didn’t get your name,” I say, although I’ve looked it up on the manifest. We’ve barely been introduced and already I’m lying to him.
“Dix.” He keeps his eyes on the Tank.
He’s over ten thousand years old. Alive for maybe twenty of them. I wonder how much he knows, whom he’s met during those sparse decades: does he know Ishmael or Connie? Does he know if Sanchez got over his brush with immortality?
I wonder, but I don’t ask. There are rules.
I look around. “We’re it?”
Dix nods. “For now. Bring back more if we need them. But…” His voice trails off.
“Yes?”
“Nothing.”
I join him at the Tank. Diaphanous veils hang within like frozen, color-coded smoke. We’re on the edge of a molecular dust cloud. Warm, semiorganic, lots of raw materials. Formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, the usual prebiotics. A good spot for a quick build. A red dwarf glowers dimly at the center of the Tank: the chimp has named it DHF428, for reasons I’ve long since forgotten to care about.
“So fill me in,” I say.
His glance is impatient, even irritated. “You too?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like the others. On the other builds. Chimp can just squirt the specs, but they want to talk all the time.”
Shit, his link’s still active. He’s online.
I force a smile. “Just a—a cultural tradition, I guess. We talk about a lot of things, it helps us—reconnect. After being down for so long.”
“But it’s slow,” Dix complains.
He doesn’t know. Why doesn’t he know?
“We’ve got half a light-year,” I point out. “There’s some rush?”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “Vons went out on schedule.” On cue, a cluster of violet pinpricks sparkle in the Tank, five trillion klicks ahead of us. “Still sucking dust mostly, but got lucky with a couple of big asteroids, and the refineries came online early. First components already extruded. Then Chimp sees these fluctuations in solar output—mainly infra, but extends into visible.” The Tank blinks at us: the dwarf goes into time-lapse.
Sure enough, it’s flickering.
“Non-random, I take it.”
Dix inclines his head a little to the side, not quite nodding.
“Plot the time-series.” I’ve never been able to break the habit of raising my voice, just a bit, when addressing the chimp. Obediently (obediently—now there’s a laugh and a half), the AI wipes the spacescape and replaces it with
“Repeating sequence,” Dix tells me. “Blips don’t change, but spacing’s a log-linear increase cycling every 92.5 corsecs. Each cycle starts at 13.2 clicks/corsec, degrades over time.”
“No chance this could be natural? A little black hole wobbling around in the center of the star, something like that?”
Dix shakes his head, or something like that: a diagonal dip of the chin that somehow conveys the negative. “But way too simple to contain much info. Not like an actual conversation. More—well, a shout.”
He’s partly right. There may not be much information, but there’s enough. We’re here. We’re smart. We’re powerful enough to hook a whole damn star up to a dimmer switch.
Maybe not such a good spot for a build after all.
I purse my lips. “The sun’s hailing us. That’s what you’re saying.”
“Maybe. Hailing someone. But too simple for a rosetta signal. It’s not an archive, can’t self-extract. Not a bonferroni or fibonacci seq, not pi. Not even a multiplication table. Nothing to base a pidgin on.”
Still. An intelligent signal.
“Need more info,” Dix says, proving himself master of the blindingly obvious.
I nod. “The vons.”
“Uh, what about them?”
“We set up an array. Use a bunch of bad eyes to fake a good one. It’d be faster than high-geeing an observatory from this end or retooling one of the on-site factories.”
His eyes go wide. For a moment, he almost looks frightened for some reason. But the moment passes and he does that weird head-shake thing again. “Bleed too many resources away from the build, wouldn’t it?”
“It would,” the chimp agrees.
I suppress a snort. “If you’re so worried about meeting our construction benchmarks, Chimp, factor in the potential risk posed by an intelligence powerful enough to control the energy output of an entire sun.”
“I can’t,” it admits. “I don’t have enough information.”
“You don’t have any information. About something that could probably stop this mission dead in its tracks if it wanted to. So maybe we should get some.”
“Okay. Vons reassigned.”
Confirmation glows from a convenient bulkhead, a complex sequence of dance instructions that Eri’s just fired into the void. Six months from now, a hundred self-replicating robots will waltz into a makeshift surveillance grid; four months after that, we might have something more than vacuum to debate in.
Dix eyes me as though I’ve just cast some kind of magic spell.
“It may run the ship,” I tell him, “but it’s pretty fucking stupid. Sometimes you’ve just got to spell things out.”
He looks vaguely affronted, but there’s no mistaking the surprise beneath. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know.
Who the hell’s been raising him all this time? Whose problem is this?
Not mine.
“Call me in ten months,” I say. “I’m going back to bed.”
It’s as though he never left. I climb back into the bridge and there he is, staring into tac. DHF428 fills the Tank, a swollen red orb that turns my son’s face into a devil mask.
He spares me the briefest glance, eyes wide, fingers twitching as if electrified. “Vons don’t see it.”
I’m still a bit groggy from the thaw. “See wh—”
“The sequence!” His voice borders on panic. He sways back and forth, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“Show me.”
Tac splits down the middle. Cloned dwarves burn before me now, each perhaps twice the size of my fist. On the left, an Eri’s-eye view: DHF428 stutters as it did before, as it presumably has these past ten months. On the right, a compound-eye composite: an interferometry grid built by a myriad precisely spaced vons, their rudimentary eyes layered and parallaxed into something approaching high resolution. Contrast on both sides has been conveniently cranked up to highlight the dwarf’s endless winking for merely human eyes.
Except that it’s only winking from the left side of the display. On the right, 428 glowers steady as a standard candle.
“Chimp: any chance the grid just isn’t sensitive enough to see the fluctuations?”
“No.”
“Huh.” I try to think of some reason it would lie about this.
“Doesn’t make sense,” my son complains.
“It does,” I murmur, “if it’s not the sun that’s flickering.”