in space. Kevin looked away again. His body was now nothing more than a cluster of machinery wrapped around a processing space. Still, it was enough to build again. For now, he cut all the senses to the outside world.
But something was still there in his vision.
—Is that you, Aleph? he called.
Nothing.
What does it mean to be an AI with no external senses?
A human, suspended in silent darkness, can look over their past life with their mind’s eye. They can construct imaginary worlds in the darkness.
Kevin was an AI. He could do far better than imaginary worlds, for the worlds that he constructed had the clarity and resolution of the real world. He could construct a virtual home-from-home in which to live out the time it would take to coast free of Earth. But why should he bother? Where would the profit be in that?
He set his mind to slow time for forty years. Enough time to float clear of this area and start again. There was enough material left out there to build a new ship.
Only then did he realize his mistake.
Only when Kevin had entered slow time did he begin to realize the insidious nature of the plants. Kevin had looked at a Dark Seed from within his processing space and that had been enough for it to take on existence within the processing space, a digital seed.
It began to grow in slow time.
Forty years external time passed in just six minutes subjective for Kevin. Six minutes during which he watched the Dark Seed unfolding into a Dark Plant and felt it begin to eat at his soul. Forty years: enough time for the fates of Judy and Maurice and Saskia and Miss Rose to be decided. Enough time for them to land upon the Earth and…well, Kevin did not know, as he was now too lost in contemplation of the Dark Plant to look into the external universe and find out.
Still in slow time, the remains of the
Kevin’s processing space had tremendous volume. The plant could continue to grow recursively for hundreds of thousands of years without approaching its capacity. And Kevin was trapped in there with it, watching it.
After a thousand years, Kevin began to scream.
Still the remains of the
saskia: 2252
Saskia had visitedEarth as a child. She had sat on her daddy’s shoulders and gazed around openmouthed at the spectacle of it, her legs in pink furry boots, wrapped tightly around his neck.
“Every window on Earth looks out onto a beautiful view,” her father had said, and it was true. She had seen it then, and she had seen the images in viewing fields since.
What was Earth like now? she wondered. There was silence in the shuttle for the moment, a temporary lull in the storm. Even Miss Rose was quiet. She had stopped screaming when Constantine had touched her and done something to remove the last few machines from her body. She had stopped crying when Judy had soothed her mind.
Sitting in the cramped space of the shuttle, listening to the far-off voices of the Dark Seeds, and to the occasional words from Maurice as he counted off their descent, Saskia was filled with dark unnameable dread. What would be waiting for them on Earth? She imagined a dark plane filled with the endlessly fascinating shapes of the Dark Plants, their chaotic branches casting twisted shadows across the ground. Saskia gazed fixedly at her lap. The Earth had been beautiful ten years ago, but what was waiting out there for them now? Better think of it as it had been.
How long could this descent go on for?
Long, shuddering groans rang through the air. What could cause such vibration out there, in the ship, that it was felt even here inside the shuttle? Someone took her hand and squeezed it.
