Элизабет Бир - Machine

Poor life choices got me into this line of work: What can I say?

I didn’t really expect it to react. But I guess I should say that I poked at the nearest peg with my finger, because the whole structure peeled away from my hardsuit before I touched it and rippled with a series of whick-whick-whick ing sounds into a folded configuration against the walls of the corridor. It left more than enough room for Tsosie and me to walk side by side.

“If we go in there it’s going to reassemble itself right through our bodies, isn’t it?” Tsosie asked.

“Maybe it’s shy.” I stepped past him, out into the corridor. He let go of my wrist as soon as I started to move. It had been a warning gesture, not a real attempt to restrain me.

Not that he could have. I was the one on the crew with the law enforcement background. And the adaptive exoskeleton under my hardsuit, giving me boosted reflexes and strength.

I paused briefly, and the tinkertoys didn’t nail me into place like a shrike’s victim. That was a good sign. I reached out again, and they peeled away from me again.

“Seems safe,” I said.

Tsosie made a little choking noise. But he followed me, boots clomping only a little. We were both, I noticed, making an effort to walk softly. It’s always hard when you first get back under grav—or simulated grav—not to crash around like one of the elephantine high-gravity systers in a proverbial china shop. The toys continued to peel apart ahead of us, and sealed themselves back up behind. “Maybe they are structural reinforcement.”

“Microbots,” Tsosie said, bending closer to inspect some of them. “Only big.”

“Where do you get the raw material to make this many… microbots? After six hundred ans in space, anyway?”

“Excellent question,” Sally said. “Keep exploring.”

“HOW ON EARTH DID THIS ship ever get this far from Terra?” Tsosie asked.

It was a terrible joke, and I refused to laugh. “It’s moving pretty fast.”

“Not that fast,” Sally said, deadpan. “I did the math.”

We both laughed at that one. Sally couldn’t help but do the math. Math was literally her entire being. The processors she inhabited were… houses. She was made of code. Elegant, elaborate, exquisite code.

I’d wanted to work on AIs when I was a kid, but I didn’t have the chops for it. So I knew just enough to appreciate what a beautiful thing she was.

“Seriously,” Tsosie persisted. “How did it get out here?”

Part of doing what we do is staying frosty. Staying focused on the task. Humor helps with that; helps you keep your distance and keep your cool. The rightminding helps, too. If you feel what everybody you’re prying out of the wreckage feels, that empathy can be debilitating.

I have no idea how people managed it back in the old diar. Such as the era this ship was from.

Tsosie was staying alert by talking about stuff we’d already been over, to keep a conversation going. “How did it get all the way here? There’s no possible way it could have covered this much distance at sublight speeds in that amount of time.”

He wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t want to think through it now. It made me shiver. There were too many unexplained things about this ship. Why was she here? Where were her crew? Why the distress signal? Why had the methane-breathing crew of the docked vessel fallen silent? And where were they ?

So many questions, and an insignificant number of answers.

I didn’t have any more time to be scared now than I’d had when I was jumping. It wasn’t my job to be scared. It wasn’t my job to theorize, and it wasn’t my job to get excited about the archaeological opportunities.

“Wormhole?” I offered, in a tone of voice intended to indicate how tentative an offering it was.

“Are they theoretically possible this week?” Tsosie asked. It sounded like a genuine question. He was a hardass, but whatever his other quirks he wasn’t sarcastic.

That was Hhayazh’s defining bit of… personality.

“Sort of,” Sally said. “Maybe. I mean, wormholes are possible. Looked at the right way, white bubbles are wormholes. Sort of. Tesseracts, anyway. Traveling through naturally formed wormholes, on the other hand… without being compressed, squished, topologically transformed, and generally spaghettified…”

If she’d had a head, she would have been shaking it.

“Okay, so Big Rock Candy Mountain didn’t drop through a natural hole in space-time. And she didn’t go faster than light, unless somebody boosted her somehow. Jury is still out on artificial holes in space-time, however.”

Alcubierre-White drives weren’t true faster-than-light travel, which still remained hypothetically impossible. They put your ship into a little bubble that compressed everything around it. So you didn’t move. Rather, the universe flowed past you like one of those old-timey murals they used to paint on a roll of canvas and spool past people sitting still in chairs, so as to simulate travel. Back on medieval Terra, or whenever.

So, technically you didn’t move. But your relative velocity could be a good deal faster than light, depending on how much power you could manage to throw at it. Sally had a lot of power.

White drives were kind of a dick move when it came to respecting the laws of physics.

A white drive would work on a ship like the one we were in. It didn’t require a lot of structural strength to sit still. But the energy requirements to build a space-time bubble around it… I didn’t think even antimatter, at least antimatter in containable quantities, could manage it. Big Rock Candy Mountain was just… too big.

“She’s moving somewhat faster than she should be, even if she’d been under constant acceleration since leaving Earth. And giving a reasonable wiggle factor for gravity wells along the way boosting and slowing her. Plus she’s on the wrong vector.”

“Thanks, Sally. So… she’s gone a lot farther using that initial v and her drive capability than she should.”

“Right,” said Tsosie. “That’s what I was saying.”

“That’s not worrisome at all.”

“ Right ,” said Tsosie. “That’s what I was saying.”

“I’ll keep working on it,” Sally said. “It’s possible they tried some slingshot maneuvers for extra velocity. In the meantime, pull out your sample kits. There’s dust in the corners. Some of it might be shed skin fragments containing DNA. Vacuum it up and analyze it, would you?”

We found the bridge soon after. Not by accident: we had the ancient plans and schematics and had been aiming in that direction. If anybody was left alive on this ship—if anybody was left at all on this ship—perhaps this was where we would find them. But when we entered, it was nearly dark and nearly silent, except for a rill of green and amber lights around the edge of the room at counter height, accompanied by a melodious beeping.

A moment later, lights began to brighten, and Tsosie and I found ourselves standing on what once must have been a fairly pleasant, beige and slate-blue bridge. The layout was semicircular; we had entered from the flattish side. Large dark viewscreens covered the arcing wall in front of us, and two rows of consoles and chairs curved around a single central command chair.

We stood behind that one, but slightly above it, as the stations we were near were slightly elevated. Oddly, in my experience, they all had tall chairs shaped for humans. The consoles all had dedicated push buttons and switches and dials, not adaptive consoles like the ones I’d worked with all my life, even back on Wisewell, the frontier settlement where I’d grown up, been orphaned, got married, had a kid, and left the first chance I’d been offered. Those consoles and chairs were the thing that brought home, unsettlingly, that everybody on this ship really had been a Terran human. Knowing something intellectually and realizing it in your bones are very different.