Hugh Howey - Half Way Home

“Holy shit,” Kelvin whispered.

“You still haven’t explained why our colony was almost aborted,” someone said.

“That’s why the farming was stopped,” Kelvin suggested, pointing out a connection I hadn’t seen yet. “Colony was worried about drawing attention to itself. The farms were shut down right after the tremors that day. Tremors drawn from the tractors.”

“ If the thing actually meant to eat the dozer,” Jorge said. “So far it sounds like a bunch of bullshit and nothing.”

“Are you kidding?” Samson asked. “It went through two of them.”

“They left it idling,” Tarsi whispered.

“Think about it,” I said. “Just follow me for a second. For years, the colony is vacillating on viability or abort. You’ve got a decent planet here, not toxic, some tricky flora, but otherwise pretty habitable. You start setting up and deploying the primary automations, but right off the soil samples come up ugly—”

“Mica’s theory,” someone interjected.

“Right. But everything else is perfect, so you get trapped in this logic loop. The AI is in some kind of if-then-else-goto programming hell. It finds a normal amount of gold in the soil, so it substitutes and makes an alloy impure enough to be strong. And here’s where the big event happens. A month ago, the first tunnel back there is formed by whatever that was.”

“How do you know a month ago?” Jorge asked.

Kelvin waved his fist at Jorge. “Because it’s a theory of our fucking birth, genius. Shut up and listen.”

I nodded and kept going. “A month ago,” I shot Jorge a glance, “one of the mining tractors gets eaten, and maybe that was enough to push the AI over the edge and toward abort. A predator that size must’ve finally tipped the scales. Let’s say another dozer came in and investigated. It would’ve seen the damage and the size of the shaft—hell, maybe it figured out what all the seismic activity was from and got scared—”

“AIs don’t get scared,” someone said.

“Or changed its mind, just bear with me—”

“But then why save us? Why change its mind again?”

“Because it found the gold in the tunnel.” I pointed to the gun. “Maybe it spotted it from the mine shaft, or maybe it did more exploring. It could’ve spent days puzzling through all this.”

“It shits gold,” Leila said. “Those big clumps of gold were some kinda bowel movement by the super vinnie.” She looked at the gun. “That thing must’ve passed through its gut.”

I turned to Leila. “Or fell out of its mouth. You remember what you told me about gold? Back in camp? You said gold was worth a lot of money because it was nonreactive. Something about valuable electrons.”

“Valence electrons,” she said, smiling.

“Right. Well, what if that thing can’t digest gold? What if it can’t process it for the same reason that other things don’t react with the stuff? What if it can chew through solid rock and uptake all the metals it comes in contact with, but it leaves the gold behind with maybe a few other things mixed in?”

“Holy shit,” Kelvin said

“What?” Jorge asked. “It’s still Mica’s theory. Why save us?”

“To build the rocket,” Tarsi said.

“Yeah, but why build the rocket?”

“Because this is a secret worth warring over,” I told him. “It’s probably the greatest find in the history of galactic exploration.”

In the glow of sunset, I could see an expression of impatience and fury come across Jorge’s face, one best not tested lest he and Kelvin come to blows.

“I was on the payload team,” I reminded Jorge. “The main body was being built to carry six cylinders. Several of us knew this. I’ve even told some of you about it, trying to postulate what might go in them. Memory cells, lessons on what went wrong here, DNA samples… it might be some of the latter, but I think that rocket is being built to deliver whatever enzymes or acids these creatures use. Imagine if you could synthesize it—”

“Or engineer bigger versions of the beasts,” Samson said.

“You could turn them loose on entire planets,” Tarsi whispered. “Why colonize a planet when you can transmute it into gold?”

“Forget the gold,” Leila said. “It’d be as abundant and valuable as our crap. Think of the useful metals like titanium, cerium, neodymium, all the rare earths. Everything worth anything could be extracted. Maybe you could even reprogram their DNA to build specific things, just like they build their skin and teeth and what-not. If so, you could do what nano-tech never could.”

“Like what?”

“Like build colonies from scratch. Or subdue entire worlds in a single generation.”

“Holy shit,” Kelvin said again.

“World eaters,” Mindy whispered.

“That’s why Colony can’t just beam the information back with the satellite,” I said. “Sure, it’ll get there quicker, but if they’re paranoid enough to abort and nuke unviable colonies, I bet every transmission is in jeopardy of being intercepted and decoded. Radio waves propagate in every direction but a physical package the size we’re sending? It would be practically invisible.”

“So it woke us up to use us?” Mindy asked.

“There was never a long-term solution,” Kelvin said. “The farms. They were never gonna get started.”

“Fucking Colony,” Jorge spat.

“Fucking Colony,” Karl agreed.

“We have to stop it,” I said, looking out at the trees between us and the base.

“Are you crazy?” Jorge asked. “How many more people have to die over this bullshit?”

“Think about what this will mean,” I said. “Not just for us, but for the rest of the galaxy. Our lives are nothing. We are specks compared to this.”

The last of the light wilted away outside, the sun disappearing with the suddenness only mountains provide. A shadow fell, like something the day forgot. In the barest of glows, I watched my friends consider what I’d said, knowing they would be chewing most strenuously on the last—on my recommendation for action. Kelvin gave me the barest of nods, his jaw flexing as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. Tarsi reached an arm around me and squeezed. The rest looked like they were having problems imagining what to do next.

I knew precisely how they felt.

That night, we all slept as best as we could in the mouth of the mine, adjusting to make room for Mica and Vincent after they woke up and came looking for us. I rested my head on Tarsi and kept a hand on Kelvin, needing—as always—to know they were both there. What I really needed, I think, was someone touching me back, reminding me that I was a thing.

That I existed .

That I wasn’t the speck I feared, far less important than six gold vials full of information.

For most of the night, I stayed awake and dwelled on the sounds of my world: the occasional whistle of a bombfruit before it thudded in the distant moss, the twitter of night bugs as they sang their nocturnal tunes, the snoring and grunts of my luckier companions as they managed to win sleep.

While I listened, I turned my theory over and over in my mind, inspecting it from all angles. I put myself in the AI’s place, watching one discovery trigger an abort sequence, then seeing the potential in a subsequent find and fighting to undo the nasty process. There was still a lot I didn’t know or understand, but the theory fit too many of the puzzle pieces together to be completely wrong.

That left the next troublesome question: What to do about it?

In an angered state, I had convinced most of my companions that we should risk ourselves to prevent the rocket from launching. But how could we stop that from happening? I felt certain we could turn the rest of the colony against the AI if they knew what was going on—when they found out there had never been a long-term plan for our survival. For all I knew, the AI planned on nuking the base as soon as the rocket went off. The patents wouldn’t be much good if we established this world and became their primary competitors—or our ancestors lived to fight off their ancestors.