David Brin - Existence

Sure, these events might happen anyway. Some in Earth’s past may explain large and medium-scale extinctions. Still, the odds change when we meddle. And meddling is what humans do best.

– Pandora’s Cornucopia

“I tell you Akana, there’s something weird about this one,” Gerald insisted, floating in the space station’s communication center. The woman facing him from the holoscreen wore a dark blue uniform with one star on each shoulder.

“That may be,” acknowledged the petite, black-haired general. “The readings from this chunk of space debris are unusual. But does it justify remissioning the tether, putting us further behind schedule?”

“It does, if the alternative means throwing away something special!”

The station’s always noisy air circulators covered the soft sound of her visible sigh. “Gerald, would you see the big picture, for once? Think about funding. If we reduce productivity-”

“Come on, Akana,” he interrupted, knowing the brigadier would take it from a civilian contractor. “Our purpose isn’t just to grab old space junk. Electrodynamic tethers offer potential to enhance spaceflight and regain some initiative out here. From propellant-free maneuvering to momentum transfer, from waste disposal and centrifugal gravity to-”

The general’s image raised a hand. “Spare me the lecture? We’re minutes from decision point… whether to let go of this object when the tether-tip reaches the bottom of its arc, and drop it into a disposal trajectory…”

“Where it’ll burn up in the atmosphere. That is, if it’s made of normal substance. But what if it survives entry? Something anomalous, striking a random point on Earth-”

“We always time release to drop into ocean, in case debris survives…” Akana’s eyebrow arched. “Are you arguing as a delaying tactic?”

“I swear, I just-”

“Never mind. I’ve looked over the pictures taken by the tether-tip during rendezvous. Yes, the readings are unusual. But I don’t see what you find so special.”

“That camera’s limited. Even so, the spectral features seem unlike anything we’ve hauled in before. Take that low-level emission profile, suggesting a small source of inboard power-”

“-an old battery perhaps. Or else some leftover chemical reactants, inherently dangerous. The sort of thing we’re charged to get rid of.”

“Or something strange? Like we’re supposed to investigate on a frontier? Anyway… I ordered the crawler to go have a look.”

“You what?” Akana Hideoshi sat up straight. “Without asking me?” The project director’s stars-of-rank seemed to glare from both shoulder boards, almost as angry as her eyes. “It’ll take hours for the crawler to climb from midpoint all the way to the tether’s tip! The bola will be useless till then. Every snatch we scheduled will have to be recalculated!”

“Sorry, but I had to decide quickly. This thing, whatever it is…”

He could see her gesture at a subordinate, off screen, demanding data. Nearby, the other two station astronauts-Ganesh and Saleh, kept busy at various housekeeping tasks while blatantly eavesdropping. Even their paying tourist-the Peruvian phosphates billionaire, Señor Ventana-drifted closer, clumsily setting aside the busywork “science experiment” he had been assigned. Amid the normal tedium in orbit, any drama was welcome.

Gerald tried changing tactics.

“Look, the tether project mission statement actually talks about retrieval of valuable objects that might have scientific-”

“You just said the key word,” Akana interrupted, with an added, jarring effect caused by lightspeed delay. “Valuable.”

She exhaled, clearly working for calm.

“Well, the point is moot. I can see from telemetry that the crawler is already beyond recall. The bola’s spin is altered and there’s no going back to our old schedule. I’ll have to assign staff and aivertime to prepare new targets. Unless-”

She left that word hanging. Unless inspection with the crawler’s instruments showed that the item really was of interest. Important enough to justify all this disruption. The general signed off without even looking at Gerald, making her meaning even more clear. A lot hung on his hunch about this thing.

His career, certainly. Possibly more.

It has to be a hoax.

The readings made no sense, even as the crawler drew within twenty meters.

The tether continued its stately whirl, high above the Earth, pumping electrons out of one end or the other, into the radiation maelstrom of the Van Allen belts, maneuvering toward a position where it might jettison the object-toward incineration or an ocean grave. Now that Mission Control had taken over the tether’s spin management, Gerald could only try to get as much data as possible before that happened.

“I don’t read anything like an onboard power source,” he said, while Hachi hovered nearby. The little monkey picked away at its diaper, but lifted eyes when Gerald spoke, replying with a low, querulous hoot.

Under scrutiny by the crawler’s camera lens-now from about eight meters away-the object glittered in a way that struck him as more crystalline than metallic. A thought occurred to him that it might be the sliver of some natural body, rather than the usual chunk of man-made space junk. Perhaps a kind of meteoroid, unlike any that science encountered before. That would be something. Though how it got into a roughly circular Earth orbit…

“Or else, it may just be an unusual kind of poopsicle,” he muttered. A chunk of congealed water and human waste, jettisoned by some early manned mission. That could explain the curiously smooth, glistening shape. Though it reflected light unlike ice, or any material he knew.

If only we equipped the crawler with better instruments.

Gerald pushed back his specs and pinched his nose. You’d think an astronaut would get used to high-tech image mediation. It was a large part of what he did for a living. But his middle-aged body sometimes felt stretched thin.

If only I were equipped with better organs! Weren’t we supposed to be getting deep bio-upgrades by the time I hit fifty? Why is the future always… in the future?

He blinked and turned his head, seeking something far away to focus on-the best therapy for a bad case of ai-gaze. Of course, the only choice in this cramped compartment was a narrow window, facing the blue vista of Earth. Cloud-flecked pressure layers resembled fingers of a great hand, blurring Texas, all the way to drowned Galveston. The Gulf, in contrast, was a vivid palette of pale and deep blues.

Gerald blinked again as several glittering specks appeared, like pinpoints of flame, diverging as they plunged toward the Caribbean Sea. Meteoroids. Or chunks of falling space debris. Maybe something he had sent drifting Earthward just last week, before he retasked the tether, risking his career on a hunch.

To work, then. Slipping the specs back on, Gerald felt virmersion surround him, like the plasma envelope during reentry. Akana had ordered him to be cautious with the robot and keep it well back, in case the mysterious object was an old fuel tank, or something else potentially explosive. “Messing with it could be a good way to lose both the grabber tip and the crawler itself,” she warned.

But Gerald felt sure that wasn’t a problem. “I’m detecting no heightened levels of volatiles in space nearby, so there can’t be any stored fuel or oxidizer. Besides, it’s too small.” The artifact-if it was man-made-appeared to be no bigger than a basketball, elongated along one axis. Perhaps an American-style football. That might be consistent with a poopsicle. But water ice should give off some gas from direct sublimation.