Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

“All of it is gone,” Saki typed. “Every living thing was destroyed.”

No one had noticed it in the warehouse because they’d had no reason to expect any living things to be there.

She and Li pulled themselves back to the center of the room, climbing their rope hand over hand until they were back at their marks. They adjusted the programming of their bees in hopes that they could get a clear image of the other visitor to the record, and set them swarming around the room.

“It’s more than that,” Li messaged as the bees catalogued the room. “That’s why this room is so odd. Everything organic is gone. Whatever is left is all metal or plastic.”

It was obvious as soon as she said it, but something still didn’t fit. “The alien artifacts, back in the warehouse—those were made from organic materials. Why weren’t they destroyed with everything else?”

One of our beloveds believes that all important things are infinite. Numbers. Time. Love. They think that the infinite should never be seen. We erase vast sections of the Chronicle out of love, but this infuriates some of our other beloveds. To embrace so many different loves, scattered across the galaxy, is difficult to navigate. It is not possible to please everyone.

Saki stood back to back with Hyun-sik. Their surroundings shifted from gray to orange-red. The two of them were floating beneath the open sky in a carefully excavated pit. The dig site was laid out in a grid, black cords stretched between stakes, claylike soil removed layer by layer and carefully analyzed. Fine red dust swirled in an eerily silent wind and gathered in the corners of the pit.

Hyun-sik swayed on his feet.

“The Chronicle is an image. Being here is no different from being in an enclosed warehouse,” Saki reminded him. He looked ill, and if he threw up in the Chronicle it might obscure important data. Even if it didn’t, it would definitely be unpleasant.

“I’ve never been outside. It is big and open and being weightless here feels wrong,” Hyun-sik messaged. He took a deep breath. “And the dust is moving.”

“Human consciousness is tied to the passage of time. In an abandoned indoor environment like the warehouse, there are long stretches of time where nothing moves or changes. It feels like a single moment in time. But we are viewing moving sections of the record, which is why we try to spend as little time here as we can,” Saki answered.

“Sorry.” He still looked a little green, but he managed not to vomit. Saki turned her attention back to their surroundings. There were no visible distortions here, no intrusions into the time record. M.J. hadn’t visited the Chronicle of this time and place.

At Li’s insistence, the team had done a three-day drone sweep of the entire colony starting at the moment of the last known transmission. Wiping out so much of the Chronicle felt incredibly wasteful, especially for such an important historic moment. If some future research team came to study the planet, all they’d find of those final days would be a sea of white, the destruction inherent in collecting the data. Though if Saki was honest, the thing that bothered her most was that she couldn’t be there for M.J.’s final moments. They had burrowed into the Chronicle deeper than his death, deeper than his final acts, leaving broad swaths of destruction in their wake.

He was gone, why should it matter what happened to the Chronicle of his life? But it felt like deleting his letters, or erasing him from the list of contacts on her tablet.

She tried to focus on the present. This site was a few weeks before the final transmission. They were here to gather information about the alien artifacts in situ. Perhaps they could notice something that M.J. and his team had missed.

In the distance, the nearest colony dome glimmered in the sun, sitting on the surface like a soap bubble. There were people living inside the dome—M.J. was there, working or sleeping or recording a vid letter that she would not read until months later. So many people, and all of them would soon be dead. Were already dead, outside the Chronicle. Colonies were so fragile, like the bubbles they resembled. The domes themselves were reasonably sturdy, but the life inside… New Mars was not the first failed colony, and it would not be the last.

The sun was bright but not hot. Expeditions into the Chronicle were an odd limbo, real but not real, like watching a vid from the inside.

“That one looks unfinished,” Hyun-sik messaged, pointing to a partially exposed artifact. It was an iridescent blue, like the bases of the artifacts in the warehouse, but the upper surface of the artifact did not have the smoothly curved edges that were universal to everything they’d seen so far.

“They changed so quickly,” Saki mused. She’d read M.J.’s descriptions of the artifacts, and looked at the images of them, but there was something more powerful about seeing one full scale here in the Chronicle. “And right as the colony collapsed. The two things must be related.”

She shuddered, remembering the drone vids of the final collapse. After weeks of slow progression, everything in the colony started dying. She’d forced herself to watch a clip from the hospital—dozens of colonists filling the beds, tended by medics who eventually collapsed wherever they were standing. Everyone dead within minutes of each other, and then—Saki squeezed her eyes shut tight as though it would ward off the memory—the bodies disintegrated. Flesh, bone, blood, clothes, everything organic broke down into a fine dust that swirled in the breeze of the ventilation systems.

She opened her eyes to the swirling red dust of the excavation site, suddenly feeling every bit as ill as Hyun-sik looked. Such a terrible way to die and there was nothing left. No bodies to cremate, no bones to bury. It was as if the entire colony had never existed, and M.J. had died down here and that entire moment was nothing but a sea of drone-distortion white.

“Are you okay, Dr. Jones?” Hyun-sik messaged.

“Sorry,” she answered. “Did you watch the drone vids from the collapse?”

He nodded, and his face went pale. “Only a little. Worse than the most terrible nightmare, and yet real.”

Saki focused all her attention on the artifact half-buried in the red dirt, forcing everything else out of her mind. She searched the blue for any trace of other colors, but there was nothing else there. “I don’t know how the artifacts changed so quickly, or why. Maybe Dr. Li can figure it out from the recordings.”

“Release the drones?” Hyun-sik asked.

“Wait.” Saki pointed toward the colony dome, her arm wiping away a small section of the Chronicle as she moved. “Look.”

Clouds of red dust rose up from the ground, far away and hard to see.

“Dust storm?” Hyun-sik turned his head slightly, trying to disturb the record as little as possible.

“Jeeps.” Saki stared at the approaching clouds of dust rising from vehicles too distant to see. M.J. might be in one of them, making the trek over rough terrain to get to the dig site. Saki tried to remember how far the dig site was from the dome—forty kilometers? Maybe fifty? The dig site was on a small hill, and Saki couldn’t quite remember the math for calculating distance to the horizon. It was estimates stacked on estimates, and although she desperately wanted to see M.J., her conclusion was the same no matter how she ran the calculation—they couldn’t wait for the slow-moving jeeps to arrive.

“Do you see anything else that merits a closer look?” Saki typed.

Hyun-sik stared at the approaching jeeps. “If we had come a couple hours later, there would have been people here.”

“Yes.”

It wasn’t M.J., Saki reminded herself, only an echo. Her lifelove wasn’t really here. Saki had Hyun-sik release the drones and soon they were surrounded by white, much as the jeeps were enveloped in a cloud of red.