Existence

explore this asteroid swarm. One of them seems poised to understand what happened here, long ago.”

Greeter’s smug tone must derive from human teledramas. But then, Greeter’s makers were enthusiasts wanting no greater pleasure than saying “hello.”

“Show me,” I demand. Perhaps my long wait is over.

63.

A CRIME SCENE

Tor stared as the asteroid’s slow rotation brought ancient, shattered ruins into view. “Lord, what a mess.”

For two years in the belt she had helped unpeel layers of a puzzle going back a million centuries. Lately, that meant uncovering strange alien ruins, but never such devastation as this.

Just a few kilometers from the survey ship Warren Kimbel, a hulking shadow blocked the starry Milky Way. Ancient collisions had left dents and craters along its two-thousand-meter axis. On one side, it seemed a typical, nameless hunk of stone and frozen gas. But this changed as the sun’s vacuum brilliance abruptly swarmed the other half-exposing jagged, twisty remnants of a catastrophe that happened when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

“Gavin!” she called over her shoulder. “Come see this!”

Her partner floated through the overhead hatch, flipping in midair. His feet met the magnetized floor with a faint click.

“What is it? More murdered babies? Or clues to who their killers were?”

Tor gestured and her partner stared. Highlights shone across Gavin’s glossy features as their searchlight swept the shattered scene.

“Yep,” he nodded. “Dead babies again, murdered by some facr’ing enemy a jillion years ago. Povlov Exploration and Salvage ought to make good money off each corpse.”

Tor frowned, commercial exploitation was a small part of their reason for coming, though it helped pay the bills. “Don’t be morbid. Those are unfinished interstellar probes, destroyed ages ago, before they could be launched. We have no idea whether they were sentient machines like you, or just tools, like this ship. You of all people should know better than to go around anthropomorphizing alien artifacts.”

Gavin’s grimace was an aindroid’s equivalent of a sarcastic shrug. “If I use ‘morbid’ imagery, whose fault is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you organic humans faced a choice, back when you saw that ‘artificial’ intelligence was going to take off. You could have wrecked the machines, abandoning progress-”

She refrained from mentioning how close that came to happening.

“-or you could deep-program us with ‘fundamental Laws of Robotics,’” Gavin sniffed. “And had slaves far smarter than their masters. But no, what was it you organics decided?”

Tor knew it was no use when Gavin got in a mood. She concentrated on piloting a closer orbit.

“What was your solution to the problem of smart machines? Raise us as your children. Call us people. Citizens. You even gave some of us humaniform bodies!”

Tor’s last partner-a nice old bot and good chess player-had warned her when he trans-retired. Don’t hire an adolescent Class-AAA android fresh out of college, as difficult as any human adolescent. The worst part? Gavin was right. Not everyone agreed that raising AAAs as human would solve one of the Great Pitfalls, or even conceal the inevitable. For, despite genetic and cyborg improvements, bio-humans still seemed fated to slip behind.

And how many species survived that crisis?

Gavin shook his head in dramatic sadness, exactly like a too smart teenager who properly deserved to be strangled. “Can you really object when I, a man-built, manlike android, anthropomorphize? We only do as we’ve been taught, mistress.”

His bow was eloquently sarcastic. Especially since he was the only person aboard who could bend at the waist. All of Tor’s organic parts were confined to a cylindrical canister, barely over a meter long and half a meter wide. With prosthetic-mechanical arms and grippers, she looked more “robotic” than her partner, by far.

To Gavin’s snide remark, she had no response. Indeed, one easily wondered if humanity had made the right choice.

But isn’t that true of all our decisions, across the last two dozen years? Haven’t we time and again selected a path that seems less traveled? Because our best chance must come from doing what no one else tried?

Below, across the ravaged asteroid, stretched acres of great-strutted scaffolding-twisted in ruin. Tangled and half buried within toppled derricks lay silent ranks of shattered unfinished starships, razed perhaps a hundred million years ago.

Tor felt sure that her silicon eyes and Gavin’s germanium ones were the first to look upon all this, since an awful force plunged through, wreaking havoc. The ancient slayers had to be long gone. Nobody had yet found a star machine even close to active. Still she took no chances, keeping the weapons console vigilant. That sophisticated, semi-sentient unit searched, but found no energy sources, no movement amid the ruined, unfinished mechanisms below. Just cold rock and metal.

Gavin’s talk of “murdered babies” kind of soured any pleasure, viewing the ruins below as profitable salvage. It wouldn’t help her other vocation, either-one that brought her to this frontier as the first journalist in the asteroid belt. Out here, you doubled and tripled jobs. Which in Tor’s case meant describing humanity’s great discovery, explaining to those back home what happened here, so long ago.

Her latest report must wait. “We have work to do,” she told her partner.

Gavin pressed two translucent hands together prayerfully. “Yes, Mommy. Your wish is my program.” Then he sauntered to another console and began deploying drones.

Tor concentrated on directing the lesser minds within Warren’s control board-those littler, semi-sapient specialist processors dedicated to rockets and radar and raw numbers-who still spoke coolly and dispassionately… as machines should.

THE LONELY SKY

Twenty-six years ago we came to the belt, seeking to collect space-fomites. Tiny, drifting crystals carrying ancient infections of the mind. Already suffering terrible fevers, we sought to gather a wide sampling for comparison, to dissect the disease. To render it neutral or harmless. Or choose a version we could live with.

Only soon, paddling the equivalent of dug-out canoes through dangerous shoals, our brave explorers found something else, in addition to virus-stones. Something older. Many older things that-if dead and silent-testified to an earlier and more violent age of interstellar travel.

Imagine how they felt, those aboard the Marco Polo… then the Hong Bao, Temujin, and Zaitsev… who first stumbled onto a vast graveyard of murdered robot starships. They had to wonder-

What happened out here? Why so many different kinds of machines? What conflict killed them and how come none survived?

Were all those long ago visitors robots?

And, most perplexing, why, after tens of millions of years, did they stop coming? What happened in the galaxy, to bring the era of complicated space probes to such a complete halt…

… giving way to a new age, when only compact crystals crisscross the stars?

– Tor Povlov