COMMANDER KINDERSLEY CALLED Aki and Per into the crew area. To their surprise, he had smuggled aboard a large bottle of whisky.
“We are not out of these dark woods yet. With the cannibalistic tinfoil factory still parked on Mercury, it will keep replicating and fabricating until it constructs another Ring,” Per said. Considering his usually flat and detached manner, Aki could not tell if he was expressing relief or frustration.
“Then we blow that one to hell too. The Builders are bound to run out of raw material sooner or later. We’ll take out their whole operation long before they figure out how to handle us,” said the commander as he unscrewed the tightly sealed bottle with his teeth.
Eventually, one of them said, “Our bravery makes us look like saviors,” but that was most likely from the effects of alcohol in zero gravity. Their plastic suction bottles made soft thumps for the last toasts. Aki felt whisky was too elegant to drink from such utilitarian containers, but that did not seem to stop her. Eventually she squirted some into the air and savored it drop by drop as it floated in front of her. The aroma wafted into her nose as she inhaled. She leaned forward and caught wet, burning beads of alcohol on her tongue, warmth permeating her body. Aki had never been much of a drinker, but now, this moment in time and space, out of the infinity of moments in her life, had to be worth celebrating, even if she could not help but view her action with some regret.
“I wonder if we will be able to use the same trick again. The Ring generators are probably smart enough to learn from this experience and make modifications to protect the next iteration of Ring construction,” Per said. Even intoxicated, his mind examined the task and considered options, but he was all cheer regardless.
“We outsmart it again. That’s the advantage of being an intelligent, living being. I’m more worried about this fleet of ships on its way,” said the commander, slurring just a bit.
The smartest of the intelligent living beings back on Earth were hard at work solving new questions inspired by the crew’s experiments. An archeoastronomer found something very interesting recorded in, of all places, a farmer’s almanac from the Ming Dynasty. The manuscript contained a drawing that depicted a blazing star that had suddenly appeared next to Orion’s belt in the year 1424. It shone brilliantly for fourteen years and then disappeared just as mysteriously in 1438.
If the ancients had known they were looking at the bundle of light from thousands of lasers propelling their neighbors into the start of an interstellar voyage, it would have changed the course of civilization. At forty-four light years away, regression analysis deduced that the Builders had departed in 1380 CE. Assuming that the deceleration lasers were about to activate and that the ships would need another fourteen years to slow and stop, their planned arrival would have been sometime around 2036, a 650-year journey.
That meant that the cruising speed of their voyage would be nearly 6 percent of the speed of light and the ships were only four-tenths of a light year away from Earth, which would have the Builder armada passing through the Oort cloud. Based on further analysis of the potency of the sail brakes and the projected velocity of the ships, the size of the fleet could be as large as five hundred Island Three O’Neill cylinder space habitats, which could accommodate several hundred million human-sized life-forms.
Without the Ring or the planned deceleration, the Builders would arrive at the inner solar system in as little as eight years instead of fourteen. Aki wondered what the life-forms would feel as they sped by the location where their ingenious Ring should be, as their planned destination receded in the distance and only endless void greeted them.
“Do you think they’ll accept their fate with dignity and fly by peacefully?” asked Commander Kindersley as he polished off the whisky.
“They will have plenty of time to think it through. I bet they figure out that their laser system was disabled fairly soon.”
Aki felt a lump in her throat. She had made a conscious decision, but felt the consequences were bittersweet.
Their purpose is not to explore or trade. The Builders launched a massive fleet without even sending a scout. They are seeking safety, traveling blind across space to cling to life. All they want is survival.
“They did not know there was intelligent life here. Their grasers were just a defense against meteoroids. They were not out to destroy us. And if that is true, then it means that…”
Aki blinked hard. Tears from her eyelashes hung in the air. Kindersley placed his hand on her shoulder.
“What I did,” Aki said, “was genocide.”
“You saved the human race. Genopreservation, not xenocide. Quick thinking and some guts and every accomplishment of our species lives on,” the commander said. “The accomplishments of the past and of the future as well. Your future, mine, those of generations yet to come. That’s all that matters.”
Aki caught a teary glimpse of the airlock door where she had seen Mark for the last time. Memories rushing back, she saw his gentle smile. He gave his life for this, willingly, and he had not asked for a thing in return.
How do humans justify atrocities? If he were here he would say, “We are going to endure. That is all that matters.”
PART II
PHYSICAL CONTACT
CHAPTER 1: THEORY OF MIND
ACT I: MARCH 11, 2024
AKI LEFT HOUSTON’S blue skies to land in Oakland fog. A Cadillac Deville limousine waited for her. Her tongue clucked when she noticed the limo was a gas guzzler, not a hybrid. Hard to believe that something wasteful had survived the years of famine and civil unrest.
“Thank you.” Aki bowed her head, one of the few reflexes that remained from her upbringing. “They didn’t need to go to such trouble.”
“The BART trains are overcrowded and dangerous. The trains rarely run on time,” the driver said.
“You would be surprised how well I take care of myself. I lived in Tokyo. You haven’t seen crowded trains until you’ve ridden the Tokyo subway during rush hour.”
Aki had formally refused a bodyguard. She allowed a personal assistant at her UNSDF office but never brought her assistant along on travel. She preferred independence, but knew that just accepting what people wanted to give her often meant less work for the international array of handlers and hangers-on. She tried to compromise in whatever way created the least fuss. Aki was a scientist first and foremost. Being a special advisor to the UNSDF, recipient of a Nobel Prize, known for saving the solar system—half the time it got in the way of the work she wanted to do.
The four-lane freeway alongside downtown Oakland was nearly empty.
“Is it always this foggy near the bay?” Aki asked, tilting open her briefcase so that she could get her phone.
“Never like this. We had the layered cotton that came from the west. Wisps or puffs that came from the hills. Now it’s relentless. We had a sunny day last week, but they’re rare.”
To Aki, it looked like today would be one of the rare sunny ones. By the time they arrived in the Berkeley Hills, most of the fog had lifted. To the west, she saw a sliver of San Francisco Bay. Even though most of the shops on Telegraph Avenue were still boarded up, outdoor restaurants and cafés had returned. Despite looking pale and haggard, the denizens walking the residential streets made her think that Berkeley was coming back to life as a university town. Some of the infrastructure had been restarted out of pure necessity, but she felt like some of the substructure and public services were returning because people were inspired by hope.