Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

The rapid advance of genetic-sequencing technology had offered one solution. With the new kits, as a gene sample was collated with the massive central data stores, linked to a great phylogenetic tree of life, and even given a provisional name within minutes, even an untrained child could “discover” a new species. And once the information was extracted there was no need anymore to worry about storing the long, fragile molecular strings of DNA itself. I’d heard that even fossils barely mattered nowadays, compared to the great flood of data and interpretation now flowing directly from the genes.

It was an eerie thought that even as the real-world ecology died back, a ghostly logical copy was being assembled in the abstraction of cyberspace. But in a very real sense Tom and his kids, and similar volunteers all over the planet, really were saving their ecology for the future.

But none of that mattered to me, not in those awful minutes.

“OK,” I said to Tom carefully. “It’s a worthy goal. But it almost cost you your life.”

“Dad—”

“Tell me what happened.”

He found it painful to talk about, I think; maybe he was in some kind of mild shock. “We were at the coast. Me and a dozen kids. I was actually fifty meters or so back, cross-checking their data streams as they sampled away. Then there was a water spout.”

“A spout?”

“Like an underwater explosion. It was like something from a cartoon, Dad. It must have been a hundred meters tall.”

“Nearer two hundred,” Sonia said dryly.

“At first the kids stood and stared,” he said. “I screamed at them to come away from the ocean. Some ran, others hesitated. Maybe they were too busy watching the spout. I was worried about waves. I didn’t know what was happening; I imagined some kind of tsunami. Then the mud started coming down. Dad, it came in big handfuls, and when it hit you it hurt. All the kids started screaming, and came running from the sea with their hands over their heads.

“That was when I saw them falling, the ones closest to the water. Just falling down as if they’d decided to go to sleep.”

“And you ran toward them,” I said.

“I was responsible for them. What else could I do? I’d only run a few paces before I could smell that rotten-egg stink—”

“Methane?”

“Yes. And then I understood what had happened.”

It had been a “methane burp.” He told me that deep under the Arctic sea floor there are vast reservoirs of trapped gas. Molecules of carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, and methane can be trapped within cages of water-ice crystals — ice formed under extreme conditions of pressure, under the weight of the sea. You can find such stuff in sediments all the way around both poles, immense banks of ice and compressed gas. There is thought to be as much carbon locked up in these reservoirs as in all the world’s fossil fuel stores. Until that dreadful day in Siberia, I had never even heard of them.

And it’s very compressed, at more than a hundred times atmospheric pressure. Any engineer would recognize it’s not too stable a situation. When the “lid” is taken off that pressure vessel — for instance when the permafrost starts to melt, the containing pressure relieved — the eruption can be severe.

I thought it through. “So a pocket of these gas hydrates gave away. The carbon dioxide and methane came gushing up. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, so it would settle back to the surface of the sea and start spreading out…” Choking anything in its path.

Everybody understood the consequences of a carbon dioxide flood. There had been an incident on Cephalonia ten years earlier that had killed thousands, an industrial accident, a carbon-sequestration scheme gone wrong.

All of a sudden Tom broke down. He buried his face in his hands. “I couldn’t get them all out. The stink of the methane drove me back. And I was scared, scared of the cee-oh-two. I couldn’t help them.”

I couldn’t even touch him. I had to sit and watch, frozen, as the competent soldier put her arms around his shoulders. “You couldn’t have done any more,” Sonia said. “Believe me, I saw your medical charts. You went as far as you could.”

“Well, one thing’s for sure,” I said. “You can’t stay here anymore.”

Tom looked up, and anger flared in his tear-streaked face. “You always said I was a quitter, didn’t you, Dad? I’m not going anywhere.”

As I tried to work out what to say, Sonia butted in. “Actually Mr. Poole’s correct. The aid agencies won’t support any more work in this area, Tom. You’re going to have to leave. We can’t get you directly back to the States. But we can chopper you to Moscow, then to a military base near Berlin, and then by civilian charter to London.”

I kept my mouth shut, knowing from long experience that while he might listen to Sonia, he certainly wouldn’t listen to me.

At length Tom said miserably, “All right. But the sequencing project—”

“That will go on,” Sonia said brightly. “They have robots to do this sort of thing now.” She stood up. “I’ll make the arrangements. I’ll, umm, I’ll leave you to it.”

She pushed her way out of the tent, and Tom and I were left together, inarticulate, joined by electronics, separated by more than distance. We started to make plans. I would fly to England to meet him in person, if I could.

But even as we talked it through I was thinking over what had happened here, and in a corner of my mind I wondered what would happen if all those icy methane deposits, all around the poles of the planet, decided to yield up their treasures in one mighty global burp.

On the ocean world, in the shelter of the flitter, Reath continued Alia’s education.

“Have you thought any more about what I’ve told you?”

“You haven’t told me anything,” she said sourly. “Nothing but that list of names. The Implications of This and That—”

He laughed. “Of Indefinite Longevity. Of Unmediated Communication. Of Emergent Consciousness.”

“What am I supposed to think? They’re just names!”

“Isn’t that enough? Alia, do you imagine I have a set of textbooks for you? To become a Transcendent is a process of discovery about yourself.”

“You mean I have to figure it all out?”

“You may discover more wisdom in yourself than you imagine. Let’s start with the first stage, for instance—”

“Indefinite Longevity.”

“What do you imagine that means?”

She thought about it. “Not dying.”

“Why is this important?”

“Because the Transcendence was created by immortals.” Every child knew that, even though it sounded like nothing but a scary story.

“Do you think extreme longevity is possible?”

She shrugged. “On the Nord we expect to live to five hundred or so, barring accidents. In Michael Poole’s day, it was rare to live much beyond one hundred. Surely it would be possible to come up with a treatment to stop the aging process altogether.”

“An immortality pill?”

“Yes.”

“And if I had such a pill, and gave it to you, you would expect to live forever?”

“Not forever. There will always be accidents. This stupid platform might fly up and tip me off into the sea any second.”

He laughed. “Yes. Undying, then, if not immortal. But, statistically, with luck, you could expect a much longer life span. An indefinite life span, in fact.”

“Indefinite Longevity.”

He smiled. “You see, we don’t just pluck these terms out of the air. And how would that make you feel?”

“It would be a wonderful gift. So much extra life—”

“Don’t spout clichйs, child,” he said.