Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

“You’re the engine,” Kiu said. “You’re the ship.”

An acceptable explanation .

And that—all the questions she could ask, like who made you or where did you come from , vanished under the tide of annoyance. “You know where you’re going,” Kiu said. “Clearly, you have some kind of intelligence. Why can’t you just fly yourself home?”

Calculations , it said, but Kiu thought there was a coyness to the answer. A slight tinge of lie. Organic processors handle some calculations better .

“If you needed organic processing, your builders could have grown a neural web on a substrate.”

Before she could finish the thought, she was answered—Well, just so. And once a human is connected, why not keep a piece for analysis?

Kiu jerked.

And then she dove, back down toward her body, coming back to the surface of her consciousness with her hands on the connectors. But then the quick-trigger affront died back, just enough to let her close her eyes again, search for the connection.

“You’re copying my neuron structure? Culling it? Replicating it?” Even in Agisa, that wouldn’t have been possible. But moving a planetoid wouldn’t be possible, either. Nor would moving anything but information at this ridiculous speed.

Not as you suspect it, the accelerator responded. Your neuron structure, even with its augments, is not deterministic as to your experiential reality. I expand myself. But if you connected looking for immortality, pilot, all you’ll receive is approximation . Still, this is valuable to me. Whether or not it is valuable to you hardly matters .

She could have laughed. “Story of my life, isn’t it?”

Well, it said. Keep coming back. So far as the story of your life goes, it will matter here more than anywhere .

That didn’t sound like something Kiu was meant to understand. She moved past it. “If you study my augments, will you course correct? Is that what you need?”

No, the accelerator said. That, I’d do for my own interest .

“Wonderful. Great.” This thing’s intelligence was entirely unhelpful. “Can you just tell me why you won’t go home?”

Kiu Alee , the accelerator said. Why won’t you let me?

Kiu worked her body as hard as she could, after disconnecting. Made circuits of the halls, pushed and pulled against fixed points, did stretches and fast motions until she was gasping air. It bled off some of the boiling energy, if not all of it.

She came to Tarsul in the console room, a far-flung little space full of screens which he disregarded. She was almost too exhausted for rage, mostly just too cynical for anything. Tarsul tilted his head to acknowledge her entry.

“We are still not on course,” he said. He sounded resigned. “I admit, I’m surprised. I don’t know of any pilot who… experienced this much difficulty.”

“I’m special,” Kiu said, voice heavy. “My brain doesn’t work right. Ace choice in pilots, though.”

Tarsul turned to better regard her. His face, in that three-quarters turn, looked drawn and pensive. Kiu could almost hear the retort on his tongue: I had no choice .

Yeah, well. Seemed to be a common complaint, here.

Kiu glared at him for a while, and then softened, despite herself. Raw deal for him; surrounded by all this wonder, and he had a murderer with a broken brain on one side, a starving arcology so hidebound they needed a planet brought to them on the other. And hour after hour, he just kept doing what was in front of him to do.

Kiu felt a stabbing moment of powerlessness, of the attendant rage. She fought it back down.

“I can try again,” she said. “One more course correction, right? No harm in trying.”

“No harm,” Tarsul agreed. Kiu wondered if, behind that easy agreement, he was already writing her off.

“Yeah,” she said, and went back down the hall. After a moment, Tarsul followed her.

Maybe she’d go into the connection and not come out. Maybe she’d let Tarsul sedate her and let the accelerator mine her brain and learn her augments and maybe she would learn the command that would set their course correctly. Maybe that was the option left to her.

What had Tarsul said? It’s adaptive to fight when one’s life is at risk . Well, throwing a punch wouldn’t save her, so maybe she should stop trying to throw the first punch. Maybe she should find something to pre-empt the violence that waited on the other side of every heartbeat. Maybe this was it.

“I think I can do this,” she lied.

“I’m heartened,” Tarsul said.

Maybe it was Kiu’s imagination, but he sounded like he had as little faith in her as she did.

No matter.

She went back to the interface. Lowered herself into the chair.

Tarsul tilted his head at her. “You seem different,” he said. His voice was curious. Maybe a shade wary.

I don’t know if I’ve given up on life or had a breakthrough , Kiu didn’t say. Maybe a breakdown . She grunted, vaguely, in reply.

“Are you well?” Tarsul asked.

“Fine. I’m always fine.”

She reached for the interface wires, and pulled them down toward her head.

Tarsul was hesitating, as though he had something he wasn’t sure he should say. Kiu paused with her hands on the wires, and raised an eyebrow she knew he couldn’t see.

Whatever internal line of thought had occupied Tarsul wended its way to a close. “I wish you luck,” he said.

“Huh,” Kiu responded.

Then she attached the connectors, breathed out, and opened up, and surrendered herself to going home.

Greg Egan has published more than sixty short stories and thirteen novels. He has won a Hugo Award for his novella “Oceanic” and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Permutation City . His most recent novel is Dichronauts , set in a universe with two time-like dimensions.

An ingot of metallic hydrogen gleamed in the starlight, a narrow cylinder half a meter long with a mass of about a kilogram. To the naked eye it was a dense, solid object, but its lattice of tiny nuclei immersed in an insubstantial fog of electrons was one part matter to two hundred trillion parts empty space. A short distance away was a second ingot, apparently identical to the first, but composed of antihydrogen.

A sequence of finely tuned gamma rays flooded into both cylinders. The protons that absorbed them in the first ingot spat out positrons and were transformed into neutrons, breaking their bonds to the electron cloud that glued them in place. In the second ingot, antiprotons became antineutrons.

A further sequence of pulses herded the neutrons together and forged them into clusters; the antineutrons were similarly rearranged. Both kinds of cluster were unstable, but in order to fall apart they first had to pass through a quantum state that would have strongly absorbed a component of the gamma rays constantly raining down on them. Left to themselves, the probability of their being in this state would have increased rapidly, but each time they measurably failed to absorb the gamma rays, the probability fell back to zero. The quantum Zeno effect endlessly reset the clock, holding the decay in check.

The next series of pulses began shifting the clusters into the space that had separated the original ingots. First neutrons, then antineutrons, were sculpted together in alternating layers. Though the clusters were ultimately unstable, while they persisted they were inert, sequestering their constituents and preventing them from annihilating their counterparts. The end point of this process of nuclear sculpting was a sliver of compressed matter and antimatter, sandwiched together into a needle one micron wide.