Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

“Thank you. No one else will have a ship like this for another fifty years.”

“How do you know?”

“We won’t release the technology until then.”

“And who is we?”

“The Environmental Agency.”

“You mentioned it before. What is the Environmental Agency?”

“In your day you called it the Watcher.”

At that point Constantine noticed something was missing.

“Hey, where are Red, White, and Blue? Where’s Grey?”

“We removed them. You’re working for us now.” She made a little moue. “Mind you, you always were.”

When he was younger, Constantine had gone fell-walking during a winter thaw. Walking above the tree line, he found himself in a land of snow and stone. Like the surface of the moon, someone had remarked, but Constantine didn’t think much of the analogy. The moon’s surface didn’t bend and crack like this one did, its gulleys and ridges weren’t choked with half-melted ice that had refrozen into smooth mounds that softened the world while not quite concealing the harshness that lay beneath.

What that land had really resembled was the surface of this comet. As Constantine descended to the dirty grey ball, he shivered at the bleak loneliness of the scene. This cold, fell-like comet had traveled a long way in the ninety-two years since he had last visited it.

Katie guided them toward a chunk of splintered rock that lay embedded in the dirty ice of the nucleus. Larger than the stealth ship, it rose from the ground like a dirty grey fist; the upper end of the rock bulged and cracked in the shape of a clenched hand. It was just as Constantine remembered it.

“How did you know about this?” he whispered to Katie in awe.

“We’ve always known about it,” answered Katie. “The Watcher had a handle on DIANA almost from the beginning. It was the Watcher who declared the Mars site a World Heritage Center, insisted that it remained untouched. Didn’t that ever strike you as being a bit too convenient? The Watcher appreciates the importance of the Mars project more than anyone. When 113 Berliner Sibelius captured your personality in order to discover more about the Mars project, the Watcher had to take over their corporation just to help suppress the information you carried. Just imagine that: a whole corporation bought out, all because of you.”

They touched down on the surface of the dirty ice. Katie did something to the feet of the robot, increased their traction. The comet’s gravity was weak; Constantine could feel the robot’s mysterious propulsion system holding them down against the icy surface. Constantine felt dizzy. His whole world was changing again.

“But we were fighting the Watcher.”

“You only thought you were. I told you, the Watcher thinks it’s essential that the Mars project succeeds. And now we’re going to do it. Everything is in place. All we need to do now is to pick up the final piece and then we can go.”

Constantine made his way to the base of the huge rocky fist. It looked exactly as he remembered it from all those years ago, viewed through the remote cameras of a stealth pod. He saw the deep crack that split the rock from top to bottom, made out the triangular space at its base. His feet held tight onto the slippery surface as he marched toward the hiding place. There was nothing to be seen but dark shadow ahead. Brilliant stars shone above the rock-littered surface.

Constantine reached into the triangular hole and felt for the smooth surface of the stealth pod, now set to matte black for maximum concealment.

“Let me,” said Katie. Somewhere in the robot’s mind she pushed the buttons that sent the unlocking signal. Constantine felt the stealth pod split apart; felt the leaking of impact gel. He reached inside the pod, took hold of the loose plastic of the C Case and pulled it clear of the pod; held it up and allowed the impact gel to drain from it and then peered through the transparent coating at what lay inside.

A two-hundred-year-old machine. A laptop computer. The seed of the Mars project.

“I hope it still works,” said Constantine.

“It will,” said Katie. “If worse comes to worst, I’m sure we can map enough of the data across to the new Martian factories for them to make a go of it.”

Katie guided them back to the stealth ship. Constantine watched carefully as they approached the seamless silver skin of the craft. They were moving closer and closer without any sign of an opening appearing. Just as Constantine thought they were going to hit, he gripped the precious C Case closer to himself…and they slid effortlessly through the silver wall. He found himself inside the airlock.

“Sorry about that,” said Katie. “We can’t risk any breaches in the ship’s integument making us visible, even for an instant. We can’t afford to be seen.”

“But by who? If we’re working for the Watcher, who else is there to hide from?”

“That’s the big question. Come on through to the living area. We’re about to insert ourselves into warp.”

Constantine was delighted. “Warp drive? They got that sorted in the end, did they?”

“Oh, yes.”

Constantine headed from the airlock into the ship’s living area. A bare room lit by blue light. It contained a chair for him to sit on. The black shoulder bag lay where he had left it, on the floor near the chair. There was nothing else in the room.

“There’s no one on the ship but us, and we don’t need anything,” Katie explained. “Most of the other space on board is taken up with equipment.”

Constantine carefully placed the C Case containing the laptop on the seat of the chair.

“Where are we taking it?” he asked.

“Into the heart of what we’ve been calling the Enemy Domain. You’re going to be hearing a lot about that. We’ve going to hide the Mars project in the ruins of the Enemy Domain.”

“But why?” asked Constantine, confused.

“The Watcher has just won its battle against a vast war machine. It wants a failsafe in case the next enemy it comes up against proves too powerful to defeat.”

“A more powerful enemy? Like what?”

“Like an extraterrestrial intelligence. What if there are alien VNMs out there, spreading toward Earth?”

“Impossible. There are no such things as alien life forms. If there were, they would have swamped the universe billions of years ago. That’s the Fermi paradox.”

Katie said nothing for the moment. Constantine could feel the motion of the stealth ship through some nonhuman equivalent sense he did not fully comprehend. He had an idea there was a lot to learn about this body.

Then Katie spoke.

“But there are aliens,” she said. “The Watcher was built by aliens. You already knew that. Jay hinted as much, back in Stonebreak.”

Constantine said nothing.

“So where are they, then?” Katie said.

Constantine missed Red, White, and Blue. Two years was a lot of time to spend in anyone’s company. When those personalities had been the only constant in his life, the loss seemed much, much worse.

Especially at times like this. He wanted to ask their advice.

Now his only source of information was the ghost of the woman that was sharing this strange new body.

It was too strange: the way he could alter his hands and feet to push the universe away from him; the way he could feel the strange note of the warp drive, a bowed note on an infinite glass tube.

“Is this another trick? Am I in another part of a simulation?” he finally asked.

“You know you aren’t.”

“This is all too complicated for me.”

“You’ll handle it. Things have changed since you were last around, Constantine. You think you’ve got problems now? When the clones from the Enemy Domain are grown, the human population of the galaxy is going to increase by a factor of one hundred.”