E-mail Matt Jarpe at m.jarpe@comcast.net
Web design & programming by David Louis Edelman.
By Matthew Jarpe
Originally published February 2004 by Asimov's Science Fiction. Copyright © 2004 by Matthew Jarpe.
The bogie had gone Newton Three. Dane knew that as soon as she woke up. There was no other reason the comm panel beside her bed would have interrupted her sleep. There was no emergency that the night shift could not handle. Nothing that important ever happened on SoPo2. Until now, because now their bogie had gone Newton Three.
Dane got out of bed and dressed. She didn’t bother looking at the clock. What difference did it make? She was up, she was on her way to the control room. It was finally happening.
Newton One was no big deal. The Solar Polar Observatories found them all the time, just another piece of junk coasting in from the Oort. Newton Two was a little more interesting. Anything that changed vectors unexpectedly was worth watching carefully.
But Newton Three was another matter. No unknown object had ever wandered in from interstellar space and fired a reaction drive engine to change course, in Dane’s entire tour as head of SoPo2. Hell, there had never been a Newton Three in the history of the SoPo Observer program. Hell, for that matter there had never been one in the history of the human race, at least not documented.
Dane walked into the control room and Torrenze, the night shift commander, stood up. “M. Zaniff,” he said, “your watch.”
Dane took the seat he had vacated. “I take it they burned?”
“Fusion torch,” Torrenze answered.
“Nobody burns a fusion torch without asking us first,” Dane said. “If it isn’t extrasolar visitors, I’m going to have their heads.” Fusion drives were dangerous, and they disrupted communications over long distances. The Coordinator Group could revoke operators licenses and recommend jail time for the uncoordinated use of such an engine.
“And if they are extrasolars they might not have any heads,” Opey Kalnikov said as he took over the Interface chair from his night shift counterpart. He made himself comfortable in the hot seat in the middle of the horseshoe. He was surrounded by controls, for the external sensor array, the display screens, and the massive artificial intelligence that ran the whole thing. He didn’t need any of those controls. He unlatched a door under the horseshoe, pulled out a cable, and jabbed the connector into the side of his head. He wasn’t in control of the computer now, he was the computer.
“Let’s operate under the assumption that it’s a stupid and careless human,” Dane told him. “Show me the data.”
The AI that was connected to Opey knew what she wanted, but only because the message went through Opey. He was the only person on SoPo2 who could directly interface with one of the three AI’s, and he made the machines more effective by orders of magnitude. In seconds, the display showed exactly what Dane wanted.
The bogie was a yellow triangle on a black surface. Known objects were indicated with white dots and tiny identifiers. She could magnify the labels with a touch on the pad of her armrest. Gravity was indicated by a network of faint blue lines, like the lines on a topo map. Most of them sloped toward the Sun, but a few were distorted by the white dots.
Suddenly, the yellow triangle was boxed in flashing red. Data scrolled off from the right side of the box to the bottom of the display. Dane slowed the replay and read through the data carefully. Most of it she didn’t understand. But she could see the emission spectrum and the filtered absorption lines clearly enough. She knew what they meant. The bogie had lit a fusion drive aimed at the Sun. It was slowing down.
“So, we’ve got company then, do we?” Seymour Gladstone stood in the doorway and smiled. “It’s about time. I was beginning to think we were sent out here as some sort of elaborate joke.” He slouched into the Ombudsman’s seat to Dane’s left. “Have they tried to talk to us yet?”
“They just burned a few minutes ago,” Torrenze said.
“You mean six and a half hours ago,” Seymour said. Dane shot him a look out of the corner of her eye, but said nothing.
“That’s right,” Torrenze answered. “As you know, there is a significant delay …”
Dane stopped him with a gesture, her finger describing a circle in the air in front of her. Move along, skip ahead. Dane hated any sentence that started with “As you know.”
“It’s still outside the orbit of Neptune, about twenty degrees off the ecliptic,” Torrenze stumbled on. “It’s moving at a few thousand klicks per second. The burn is pretty hard, sixty g’s.”
“Lucy,” Dane said, “anything human-made ever do sixty g’s?”
“Not with people inside,” Lucy Totek answered her from the Traffic station. “At least I wouldn’t want to clean out the ship after they’re done.”
“Then it’s either automated, advanced tech, or extrasolar, in that order,” Dane said. “We could send them a stern warning about that fusion torch.”
Seymour waved his hands. “It wouldn’t do any good. If it’s a machine, it’s obviously not programmed to obey the law. If it’s people they either know about the Coordinator Group and are choosing to thumb their noses at us, or they don’t know and they probably won’t listen. And if they are extrasolars, a stern warning might put them off. Assuming they savvy our lingo, that is.”
Dane nodded. “Good point. Let’s treat them as extrasolars for the time being. Can’t hurt. Opey, send them the Math Quiz.” The Math Quiz was a series of beeps that made it clear that the sender was intelligent, and it prompted for a reply that proved the same thing about the recipient. It was broadcast on several frequencies.
“What do you figure they’re aiming for?” Seymour asked.
Torrenze shrugged. “With their current vector, they won’t come anywhere near a planet until they enter the inner system The biggest thing they’re going to run into in the next few months is a Trans-Neptunian Object about three billion klicks from Uranus, the closest planet.”
“What the hell do they want to go there for?” Seymour asked. “Why waste all that fuel for a TNO? They come all this way just to watch ice not melt? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t make sense because we don’t have any data,” Dane said. “Anything special about this TNO?”
“It’s inhabited,” Lucy said. “Registration is a little vague. All we have is a name. The colony calls itself Wernicke’s Children.”
“Homesteaders?” Dane asked with a wince.
“It looks like it,” Lucy answered. “They’ve got no supply service, no communication other than the transponder signal for the last twelve years. One spacecraft has visited since it was founded, and that was nine years ago. We have no idea if anyone is still alive there. The records should be at Solar Prime. The trajectory makes it clear why they stopped there, though. It’s the first object with a radio signal they ran into on their way into the system.”
“Did it have to be homesteaders?” Dane asked under her breath.
#
It took longer than it should have to get the information back from Solar Prime. There was over an hour time lag each way, but it was almost noon before the response to Dane’s query came back. Seymour was the main communication link with the Coordinator Group headquarters in orbit around Mercury. At Dane’s insistence he sent three follow up messages to his various contacts in the organization before they got the registration documents for the Wernicke’s Children colony.
“Finally,” he said, pulling the text message up on his screen. “Would you believe they had to dig this out by hand? Someone on Earth actually physically stuck his hand in a file drawer and pulled out paper to get this data. It had better be good.”
“If they’re homesteaders, it’s bound to be interesting,” Dane said. You had to be at least a little bit crazy to set up camp on a frozen ball at the far edge of the solar system. And most of the homesteaders were not a little bit crazy at all, not by a long shot. Industrial strength crazy was more like it.
“Here we go, Wernicke’s Children is a colony set up for people suffering from a mental disorder called Wernicke’s aphasia. Hell, that’s relatively normal. No indication here what that disorder is. I’ll just consult the database.” He began to stab at his keyboard in his distracted and unfocused manner.
“Can we have that data sometime today, Seymour?”
“Relax, Dane. The aliens aren’t going anywhere. Ah, here we go. Wernicke’s aphasia is a disruption of a specific region of the brain by stroke or trauma. Messes with language processing so you can’t talk. It’s also called sensory aphasia to distinguish it from motor aphasia. Patients can speak, but they usually spout gibberish, and they often don’t understand the spoken word.”
“Any other symptoms? Are these people a danger to themselves or others?”
“Not from what I’m reading,” Seymour said. “Looks like it’s usually a very discrete lesion that causes this disorder. You lose a bigger piece of your brain and they don’t call it Wernicke’s aphasia, they call it something else. Massive brain damage.”
“Well, this certainly wouldn’t be my choice for a first contact,” Dane said. “On the other hand, maybe it isn’t so bad. The staff that takes care of these people might have some special insights about language.”
Seymour grimaced. “It’s a stretch. Do you want me to call them up and find out what their capabilities are?”
“Be discreet,” Dane said. “Anyone could be listening, and we don’t want to get the other homesteaders excited. Bad enough they should run into one bunch of crazies, without having the whole zoo descend on them. In the meantime, we’re coming up on our earliest window to get a reply to the math quiz. Opey, are all channels open?”
Opey spoke with his human voice and the control room speakers at the same time. It was a creepy effect, but it served a purpose. When you heard that, you knew you were getting an AI/human mind interface working on your request. “We’re bringing in all wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation,” he said. “Maximum computing power is on line to analyze any communications. Earliest response time in three minutes.”
The bogie was just beyond the orbit of Neptune. It took 5 hours and 40 minutes for the Math Quiz to get there, and it would have taken the same amount of time for the earliest reply to get back. Dane watched the clock while her right foot tapped against the floor.
“I’m getting something,” Opey said. “Radio broadcast, the same range of frequencies as the message we sent.”
“A response to the Quiz?” Dane asked.
“It is not an answer to the quiz,” Opey said. “It looks random.”
“So they can’t do the math.” Seymour said. “Hell, I’m not sure I could do that quiz myself. I should give it a try someday.”
“I’m analyzing the data,” Opey said, and he drifted off. The three AI’s on SoPo2 were using all of his human intuition to augment their own number crunching abilities. He was still in the zone three hours later.
“Opey, I’m going to have to ask you to come up for air,” Dane said. “You need a break.”
“I’m OK,” Opey said, but he said it in his own voice without the speakers. The AI’s had let him go.
“Are you getting anywhere?”
“I’ve gathered in over three hours of pulses, but I can’t see any pattern. No repetition, no evident syntax. The information content still reads as zero. It’s noise.”
“Well, let’s just keep gathering data, and send out some more simple messages of our own. We’ll figure out what they’re saying sooner or later.”
#
“Options,” Dane said when the last of her staff had taken their seats in the conference room. The messages from the bogey remained untranslatable three days later, while the message they had sent to the Wernicke’s colony had met with dead silence. The people of the colony, if any remained alive, were either unable or unwilling to respond.
“Standard procedure,” Seymour said. “We need an agent on site. We can’t do our business right with this time lag.”
Dane frowned. She hated being reminded about the time lag, but Seymour was right. “Lucy, who’s closest to that TNO? What can we commandeer?”
“We can commandeer any spacecraft in the solar system,” Lucy said. The Coordinators didn’t rule by physical force or force of public opinion, but they had a long reach all the same. “But only two ships are in a position to reach the colony in less than sixty days: a long range hauler called Rattle and Hum and Farchild III.”
“Farchild?”
“Just a short elevator ride from this very conference room,” Seymour said. “How convenient.”
“That can’t be right,” Dane said. “We’re almost six light hours away. There has to be something closer.”
“Outer system is a big place,” Lucy said. “It doesn’t take much orbital separation to put serious distance between things. We’ve got momentum because we’re orbiting in the right direction, and we have the fuel.”
“Fuel isn’t the issue,” Dane said. “I can requisition all the fuel we need like that.” She snapped her fingers.
“You can buy all the fuel you want, sure,” Lucy said, “but you can’t get it where you need it. It’s faster to just send someone from here. Farchild can make the trip in about three months. That’s a few weeks after the bogie gets there. Rattle and Hum is a cargo hauler schlepping a load of biomass out to some other gang of homesteaders on spec, hoping to trade for some volatiles, I guess. It’s a single man, and it can’t be a very smart one with that business plan. He can get there in 63 days.”
“Could Farchild make it back?” Dane asked.
“No, it’d use all its fuel getting there. We’d have to send someone out to fuel it up. Or maybe these Wernicke’s people have some refined HyOx stored up.”
“I can’t imagine,” Dane said. “Schedule the refuel now. I’m going. I’ll need a crew of two. Any volunteers?” Dane watched her entire staff desperately trying to disappear under the table. “OK, it isn’t exactly a plum assignment. Chances are very good it’s just some reckless cowboy with a broken radio. You’re going to be stuck on Farchild for three months en route with me, then you’ll be cooling your heels out on a TNO for God knows how long. Pretty crummy, right? But maybe you’ll be the first to meet an extrasolar sentient. Just maybe, you’ll make history.
“So, who wants to take this challenge?” The silence was deafening. “All right, we’ll play it that way. Who’s up next on the flight readiness list?” Dane called up the list on her data pad. “Why M. Gladstone, that’s you.” Seymour groaned. “And next, M. Kalnikov.” Opey perked up at the mention of his name.
“Great,” Lucy muttered. “The first people the aliens get to meet besides the Wernicke’s Children are Seymour and Opey.”
#
Dimitri Kalnikov should never have been an Opey. It was illegal on every world in the solar system to perform the operation that opened his brain to direct link with the AI’s. The operation was risky and had to be performed before the brain had fully developed, and elective surgery on minors was against the law. But his parents had paid for the illicit surgeon on Mars to implant a computer interface in their son. At the time, they had believed that they were ensuring his future, securing for him a lucrative career as an indispensable computer consultant.
They were right. There were very few people like Dimitri in the solar system, only a handful that the AI’s could directly link to. To the AI’s, these people were priceless resources, their organic peripherals. Without them, the AI’s were cold and logical and of limited value. But connected together, computer and human brain became much more than the sum of their parts. The AI’s sought out these organic peripherals and made sure that they were treated well.
Other humans treated the Opeys with suspicion. No one knew what sort of information was exchanged between man and machine. No one knew what an AI/human interface was capable of. And anything the computers wanted so badly, that they were willing to pay so dearly for, well, that had to be dangerous, right?
#
Seymour stopped Dane in the corridor and held up a bottle of Earth wine and a Martian made wrist computer. “What do you think?”
“What do I think about what? Shouldn’t you be on the ship? We’re taking off in ten minutes.”
“A gift. Which one do you think?”
“For the extrasolars? Seymour, are you nuts? They’re not going to want either of those things.” She continued down the hall, and Seymour walked backwards in front of her.
“Well we have to give them something. What’s your suggestion?”
“Tank of deuterium,” Dane said. “We’ve got it covered.”
“That isn’t very imaginative,” Seymour said. “It’s like giving socks for Christmas. How about something ceremonial? A traditional gift we give strangers? That’s what the wine is. Americans bring wine. The watch was Opey’s idea. What did your people give strangers back in the old country?”
“Seymour, my people didn’t give gifts to strangers. We gave them the clap. Now let’s get on that ship.”
“I’m taking the wine. Hell, if they don’t like it, at least I can drink it. I chose a red. I hope that’s OK.” They came to the bay where Farchild III waited in the launch cradle.
Torrenze met them at the hatch. “I’ve done the last minute check. You’re go for launch.”
“Is the AI hooked up?” They had waited until the last minute to move the computer. Three computers together were far more effective than two, and they were still trying to crunch some kind of meaning out of the alien’s nearly constant broadcast. So far it was still undecipherable in all forms of signal modulation known to humans. Opey would continue to work on it during the trip, while the two AI’s left on SoPo2 would keep sampling the transmissions and sorting through the data. They would send packets of the information all over the solar system for analysis.
“It’s on standby for the launch,” Torrenze told her. “It isn’t meant to take the g-forces.”
“Neither are we,” Seymour said as he wedged himself into the acceleration couch. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going on standby myself.”