David Brin - Existence

Ika, the young Neanderthal, drifted nearby, her fingernails and toenails bearing active paint that both sparkled and tracked her limbs’ every surge or twitch, transforming them into subtle commands. Meanwhile Hiram, the autistic savant, immersed under a total vir-hood, whimpered and moaned in one of the dialects of his race, a language that other generations mistook for defective nonsense-monitoring too many inputs for Gerald, or even most computers, to comprehend.

A very small team, capable of acting in place of many. They had practiced this operation back in Earth orbit, and again several shifts ago-before the FACR fight. Now, it was time to launch Operation Probe.

Taking a key from a chain around his neck, Gerald reached under the nearby console and turned a hidden lock. Simultaneously he sent a simple code-pict to the ship’s core. A faint rumble followed.

Through the big control center window, with unobstructed real eyes reacting to sun-propelled photons, he watched one flank of the ibn Battuta slowly open along a seam-a crease that few even knew was there. Unfolding like a movie robot, or the cargo bay doors of some ancient bomber-plane, twin panels turned to lay bare slim payloads. Four metal tubes, each of them not much bigger than a tall man.

It couldn’t amount to much, or the bean counters would notice. But we can pass off the sudden disappearance of a few hundred kilos. Call it a garbage toss. The bookkeeping is already arranged.

One by one, the tubes slid free of the panels that had sheltered them, innocuously, all the way from Earth. Soon, at a nudge command from Ika’s left foot, each of them lit up at one end-firing small rockets. The slender cylinders didn’t have far to go. Just a few dozen kilometers. Gerald watched them diminish rapidly, aimed generally toward the Big Eye.

Okay, it’s my turn.

He clicked some teeth and grunted a few old-fashioned subvocal commands. The real world faded and his percept filled with sixty-four little frames, each of them emulating a human face.

The expedition commanders.

“Okay, you’re all awake, I see,” he murmured in throat-speech. “Each of you should be ready to deploy in less than an hour. Any problems to report?”

Most of the figures simply shook their heads or indicated a simple “negative” response, by quick-code. A few were more verbose.

“No difficulties, Commodore Livingstone.”

“Ready, operational, and eager, Gerald.”

“All is copasetic, sahib!”

“Ikimasho. Let’s go.”

“Coo-yah, dis be one tallowah-good vessel, mon. A big-up on all you bredren! Luck an’ more time to come.”

That last came from a dusky visage with what looked like waving snakes for hair. Gerald allowed himself a twitch of amusement. Despite all surface appearances, he had confidence in that captain. In all of them, for that matter. After a lengthy selection process, these duplicate personalities had been chosen for certain traits. Among them reliability. And bottomless curiosity.

“All right then. Your carrier rockets will release you, one by one, changing course between each drop. At the arranged point, you’ll deploy sails.”

It wasn’t necessary to say any of that. But Gerald judged it best to maintain a sense of ritual, treating these ersatz beings like people till the end. Real or not, they were brave souls.

“Good luck. And in posterity’s name, I thank you all.”

This time, all sixty-four took turns responding verbally.

“Bon chance, toutes amis!”

“All best and tallyho.”

“It may not be to infinity, droozhya, but anything is better than Siberia.”

“Joyous travels, comrades!”

And so on. Sixty-four benedictions unrolled, as each persona bade the others farewell and signed off. It would be years before they reported back again.

Hiram moaned and thrashed a bit. Ika answered with correcting waggles of her fingers and toes. “Okay, okay! I’m adjusting thrust vectors on carrier number four. It’ll be all right. In fact, we’ll drop the first package from carrier two… now!”

The slim, man-size rockets were already beyond sight, except each time one of them briefly glimmered with a course-altering pulse. From these brief flickers-and the detailed data streaming through his percept-Gerald could tell that the first one was heading into a zone somewhat “above” and beyond the Donaldson-Chang Array. Another plunged at an angle just “below” and past the giant, multipetaled mirror. Numbers three and four were veering left and right, giving little bursts to alter direction each time they let go of a cargo capsule.

Gerald’s in-eye depicted the pattern as four sprays, each consisting of sixteen rays, spreading like the seeds of a dandelion, except that all sixty-four tiny packets forged “ahead” of the huge telescope, aiming both solar-outward and along the direction of orbit. The general way you must go, if you want to leave the inner solar system behind.

It was time to ask. “Are we charged up?”

Jenny Peng had her mother’s exotic, Hunan beauty, but her father’s easy-going Sichuan smile. Gerald recalled with some fondness how Peng Xiang Bin used to wear a similar expression, taking everything in stride, during those first tense weeks of the Great Debate-back when humanity’s fate hung on pitting his “worldstone” against Gerald’s Havana Artifact. It was a frustrating time, when both Courier of Caution and the simulated beings within the other crystal seemed to balk, preferring to spew denunciations than cooperate-answering humanity’s questions in a systematic way, neither stone wanting to hang lower than the other.

At every setback, Bin would shrug and nod, as if absolutely sure that everything was going to work out. As if the top scientists and experts and brahmin-boffins that he now got to work with worried way too much. What? his smile seemed to say-especially after his family was brought to join him. You think this is dangerous or hard?

In fact, Bin nearly always turned out to be right. Especially when Gerald, Emily, and Akana returned from their first expedition with more intact capsules. Forced to compete for human attention, they began undercutting each other, and even telling the truth. At least, part of it.

Jenny radiated that kind of confidence now. Her animated penguin-a longtime family motif-seemed to hop with excitement amid the two-dimensional folds of Jenny’s sweatshirt.

“Charged and ready, sir. First target should enter the zone in… ninety seconds.”

That soon?

As he grew older, time seemed to move in fits and starts. Or maybe it had always been like that. He just begrudged it more, nowadays. Gerald realized with some bemusement that almost an hour had past since the ibn Battuta peeled open to reveal its hidden cargo. Gerald commanded his body to let go of tension. To inhale. Exhale.

We’re about to take our first step. Is it really down a road of our own choosing? A unique solution, as Ben Flannery calls it? Or is that just a delusion, as great as the one that infected Courier’s folk? One that will finally take us down the same dismal path as every other Infected Race?

Hiram moaned, but not unhappily. “The first sails are deploying right on schedule,” Ika translated, while twitching to make some adjustments. “Jenny, you may fire along the prearranged sequence. I’ll stop you if any of the probes need more time.”

“Thank you, Ika. Preparing the first propulsive pulse in five, four, three, two…”

When it happened, hardly anything was visible in the real world, except a faint glimmer as one spread-open photon sail took its first meal. Ten thousand square meters of atom-thick film accepted several gigawatts of raw, coherent light from the Big Eye-less concentrated than the cutting weapon-beam of a few days ago, but more than potent enough to drive the sail-and its tiny cargo-outward for five minutes of hard push, to begin its journey.