“No response yet,” Travon said.
“Gee, really?” Fayez replied, the sarcasm in his tone meant for everyone else. Travon wouldn’t hear it.
While the protomolecule might communicate in ways that looked like they were faster than light once it got going, it didn’t start it right away. Since locality wasn’t a big deal for the protomolecule, but the speed of light was, Elvi suspected it was some slower-than-light handshake as the two network nodes agreed on the protocol to be used. That was somewhere between a guess and a metaphor, but it helped her to think about it.
Her sample came out of Cortázar’s laboratory pens. It hadn’t existed until the recent past. Everything they were trying to interact with here had been waiting since humanity had been a kinky idea that two amoebas came up with. So somehow, when her node came into physical proximity—meaning somewhere in the same solar system—for the first time, they were creating some kind of relationship to each other on the fly. Which was awesome, but also weird. And not how quantum entanglement worked, unless somehow it was.
In her study of the protomolecule and the civilization that had created it, Elvi often found herself glad she wasn’t a physicist. What the protomolecule did biologically, while not entirely explicable yet, at least seemed like it might be fully understood some day. The mechanisms by which it hijacked life and repurposed it were incredibly advanced, but not totally dissimilar to things like viruses and parasitic fungi. She didn’t understand all the rules yet, but she felt like she could, given enough time and research.
What the protomolecule did to physics looked less like a variation and refinement of the standard models and more like kicking the game table over and scattering the pieces across the floor. Elvi wondered if Jen Lively’s constant lighthearted joking was so she didn’t go insane as her understanding of reality was ripped to shreds in front of her on a daily basis.
“Getting a reaction,” Travon said.
“Yeah,” Jen agreed. “Something’s happening in the object.”
“What was the delay on that?” Elvi asked.
“Eighteen minutes.”
They were nine light-minutes from the structure, so that made a handshake propagating at or near c plausible. She really needed to write that hypothesis up and run it past the nanoinformatics staff.
Elvi’s screens went wild with readings from the catalyst’s sensor package. It was too much data to be analyzed in real time, so Elvi let it wash over her like a wave of numbers and graphs. There would be plenty of opportunity later to figure out what it all meant.
“Looking stable so far,” Travon said.
“Always glad when things don’t immediately blow up,” Elvi said, but no one laughed.
“You know what makes a diamond green?” Jen asked everyone and no one. “I looked it up.”
“Radiation,” Fayez said. Of course he knew. He’d been on the Ilus team too, as its geologist. While the opening of the protomolecule gate network had given Elvi more than thirteen hundred new biospheres to study, it had given Fayez ten times that many new geologies to explore. Some of them as exotic as a great huge lump of carbon crystal that was a really pretty color. “Diamonds that form in the presence of radiation can get that green color. Some people mistake them for emeralds. But totally different mineral. Emeralds are beryl, not carbon.”
“Stealing my thunder there, sport,” Jen said. “But I’m betting it means that this star was a lot more active when the object was formed. My best guess, based on stellar decay, is that the object is almost five billion years old. That’s been hanging out for about a third of the time the universe has, you know, existed.”
“That would make it one of the oldest artifacts we’ve found,” Travon said, suddenly interested. “Maybe something from the very beginning of their civilization.”
“Fascinating,” Sagale said, his clipped tones the only sign of his impatience. “What’s it doing?”
What’s it doing that helps us fight ghoulies from beyond time and space? was the implied question. For all her bottomless budget, for all the cream-of-the-crop science teams she’d been given and her custom-built state-of-the-art ship, there was only one result the high consul and his Science Directorate cared about. How do we stop the things that eat ships passing through the gates?
“I don’t know,” she said. “Let me take a look.”
Eighteen hours into their data collection, Elvi retired to her cabin. She’d learned early on that the military discipline of the Laconians didn’t extend to forcing people to work on no rest. Duarte wanted everyone at peak efficiency. Baked into that was the idea that most people would spend a third of their day sleeping. When Elvi climbed out of her couch and said she needed to rest before she began her analysis, Sagale didn’t bat an eye.
It was a trick she’d started using to buy uninterrupted work time. She’d been able to go twenty-four hours straight since grad school. Some caffeine tablets and hot tea, and she could go forty-eight if she needed to. Not sleeping bought her eight or nine hours without Sagale’s questions about results and timetables.
But the gag only worked if everyone pretended that she actually was sleeping, so for Fayez to burst in meant he had something big.
“It made a copy.”
Before Elvi could ask what had made a copy and what it had made a copy of, he’d floated over to the dining table in the middle of her cabin and slapped his terminal down on it. The electromagnetics in the table kept the terminal from floating away, but the impact sent Fayez tumbling gently toward the wall. He was an Earther, born and raised, and no matter how much time he spent in space, he never seemed to lose that instinctive expectation of gravity. As he drifted away, he yelled at the table, “Show her! Show her … the thing! Display last file, volumetric display.”
A holographic map of what looked like a human brain appeared, floating above the table. The brain sparked with flashing synaptic paths, probably an fMRI or fNIRS scan. Elvi had seen this particular brain often enough to know it belonged to the catalyst. That it had been a woman, once upon a time. Fayez hit the bulkhead and pushed off with one foot, rejoining her at the table.
“A lot of activity,” Elvi said. “But taking her out of her pen might be causing her stress, or physical discomfort. Nothing here is all that unusual.”
“That’s just her being her,” Fayez said, shaking his head and tapping away at his terminal. “Look at this.”
A second image appeared. It took Elvi a moment to recognize that it was a copy of the catalyst’s brain activity, but without the physical structure of the brain.
“I don’t understand. What’s that second image from?”
“That,” Fayez said with a grin, “is coming from the object.”
“What, the whole thing is mirroring her brain activity?”
“No, it’s very localized,” Fayez said, and tinkered with the controls. The second image zoomed out for a long time until the entire object was in view. A tiny white dot appeared. “That dot is not to scale, of course. It’d be the size of Greenland at this distance. But that’s the approximate location of the image.”
He tapped some more, and the image was replaced with long strings of sensor data. “Jen started picking up some EM fluctuation in the surface of the object. I mean, in context it’s tiny, but the object is totally inert, and the sensors on this boat are as sensitive as a galactic tyrant’s money can buy.”
“Okay,” Elvi said. “What does she think we’re looking at?”
“At first it just looked like some photons bouncing around, until Jen put together this map. No one knew what we were looking at until Travon said, ‘Hey, that looks like an fMRI.’ I pulled up the catalyst’s monitor, and boom, there we were.”