Existence

the next great seed-dispersal, every spore took along a copy of the queen or king. (Isn’t that what Pharaoh would have done?) And the arrogance of those aristocratic passengers has apparently continued, undiminished, across the eons. (It also dropped them to the bottom of our ongoing “alien popularity poll.”)

Other societies used lotteries, or selected their “best” for in-loading. A few tried to provide one escape pod to every member of their race. All of which has sparked a rising tide of debate among humans over how we should allocate berths, assuming we choose to accept the offer.

Yes, that very conversation has stirred an interesting suspicion from some of the most persnickety smart-mobs out there. Consider this. By drawing the public into discussing how we’ll choose our human emissaries, the artilens successfully diverted our initial reaction. Our shock toward the overall idea. Maybe it’s a good thing the commission had to wind up its first-round of interviews and switch over to downloading technical data. Sure, those conversation sessions were frustratingly brief. But while the boffins suck down volume after volume of technical schematics, we can ponder broader questions.

Like… what if this diversity-ninety or so highly varied individuals-was contrived to show us what we want to see? Even the artilens who seem unhappy-those Hamish Brookeman called his “dandelion whiners.” (No I am not giving Brookeman cred, just using his witty term.) And even the inhabitants who appear completely mad. Even they might be part of the sales pitch. Or coerced by the majority within that crystal ship.

Could we ever tell? Perhaps when space missions return with more samples. Then it should be possible to compare…

* * *

Just a minute. Just a minute. I’ve just detected…

Oh, this is crazy. Can it be…

Ray guns? Are you serious?

53.

POTEMKINS

The Dowager Baroness Smits was furious over her missing son and heir. No sign of rocket or pilot had been seen at the assigned splashdown site or where Hacker was found.

Lacey could hardly blame her. For weeks, both women shared the same dark dread, combining resources in common cause. Only, where she let professionals do their jobs, the noblewoman charged across the Caribbean, berating all in sight. Nor was she gracious when Lacey’s son turned up safe, having gone native with some altered dolphins.

Worse, the recovered black box from Hacker’s rocket revealed that the two young men had waged a dangerous game-space war-during their suborbital flight. The baroness now vowed legal action. Retribution. Even vendetta. Lacey recalled her own wild ride between hope, rage, despair, and relief. Trying to stay sympathetic toward a distraught mother, she also took precautions.

“So recordings show Hacker tried to dissuade the Smits boy?” she asked her attorneys. “He fought reluctantly, in self-defense, while trying to alert that inbred putz of his peril?”

The lawyers agreed, while striking some words from the record, adding that Hacker’s behavior hadn’t been entirely above reproach. I’ll say, she thought. Lacey might even try to make that point with Hacker, later… if the boy were reachable by scolding. Still, she was elated to have him back. And to see a new project-to resume modifying dolphins-drawing his focus. Hacker needs a cause, a passion.

This one would stir trouble! Earlier efforts to “uplift” animals, with gene-mods and tailored egg craft, wrought uneven or unhappy results. Like the Helmsley Dogs, bred to “improve canine-kind more than in six thousand years.” But a spaniel who can play crude checkers, while losing the ability to be housebroken, didn’t impress Lacey. So far.

Or those discarded ArtiCritters that infested back alleys in Tokyo, desperately acting cute and doing tricks to survive after their owners tired of them. Work on altered chimpanzees had been stopped by activists from the Heston League. And no one knew where the Basque Chimera had disappeared to, or if the child with Neanderthal genes still lived.

Hacker’s endeavor might offend even more people, like romantics who considered cetaceans “already intelligent,” needing nothing that was merely human. Both nature lovers and religious fundies might again join forces to thwart meddling with higher animals. But Hacker would thrive on that. This was her path, too… using money not for indolence or status, but to forge outward. Seeking the horizon.

Only, she noted, when my extraterrestrials finally showed up, they proved weirder than I ever imagined. I feel like a car-chasing mutt who finally caught one.

What do we do with it now?

* * *

It. That was how many viewed the Havana Artifact… no longer a ship or vessel, carrying a crew, but as a single machine-entity. Oh, the varied “passengers” were diverting, with stories about ninety wondrous lost worlds, lost civilizations. Yet, sober-minded people focused on the probe’s singular purpose.

So, after a tearful, joyful reunion with her prodigal son, at the groundbreaking of Hacker’s new institute in Puerto Rico, Lacey rushed back to the Contact Center, ignoring calls and veiled threats from her aristocratic peers in favor of more interesting company-colleagues from the Boffin Caste.

“The Artifact is not so much a chain letter as a type of virus,” asserted Professor Henri Servan-Schreiber.

“What do you mean?”

“A chain letter self-propagates by inducing the recipient to send more copies onward. But a chain letter is limited and satiable. Even when you fall for the sales pitch, you just make a few copies. Not enough to do yourself serious harm.”

“I see,” Lacey ventured. “But when a virus invades a cell, it hijacks every resource to make unlimited self- copies, even risking the host’s life, then compels the host organism to spew them toward more potential hosts. Like a flu victim, coughing upon neighbors.”

“Except,” mused a cyber-psychologist from Capek Robotics, “here the viral invader is a physically passive crystal, that does nothing, interacting only via information. And the host is human civilization.”

Lacey shook her head. “Wow, that comparison is sure to win friends.”

Henri seemed impervious to sarcasm. “Madam Donaldson-Sander, the parallel-while not perfect-appears apt. Only instead of injecting new genetic instructions, this kind of self-replicating machine utilizes persuasion. The enticement of adventure. An allure of personal immortality. The temptation of new technology… all of it augmented by a threat of impending species extinction. Each of these appear to be effective selfish memes.”

“They must have already been effective,” interjected Ram Nkruma, a bio-informatics specialist from Ghana. “A hundred previous organic species were talked into participating, adding their own twists. Refining the message.”

“You mean, earlier copies of this-space virus-managed to get those other races to sneeze more crystal envoys onward, into space.”

Lacey motioned toward the thick glass separating their advisory group from the main contact commission. Right now, Gerald Livingstone and other team members were gathered in a corner, arguing. Some distance away, schematics scrolled across the ovoid’s inner face while technicians recorded ream after ream of documents and