Existence

Tor followed Gavin through curled, twisted wreckage of a gigantic replication yard. An eerie place. Huge and intimidating. No human power could have wrought such havoc. That realization lent chilling helplessness to an uneasy feeling that she was being watched.

A silly reflex reaction. Tor told herself again, the destroyers had to be long gone. Still, her eyes darted, seeking form out of the shadows, blinking at the scale of catastrophe.

“It’s down here,” Gavin said, leading into a cavelike gloom below the twisted towers. Flying behind a small swarm of little semi-sentient drones, he looked almost completely human in his slick spacesuit. There was nothing except a slight overtone in his voice to show that Gavin’s ancestry was silicon, not carbolife. Tor found the irony delicious. Any onlooker would guess she was the creature made of whirring machinery, not Gavin.

Not that it mattered. Today “mankind” included many types… all citizens, so long as they showed fealty to human law, and could appreciate the most basic human ways. Take your pick: music, a sunset, compassion, a good joke. In a future filled with unimaginable diversity, Man would be defined not by his shape but by heritage. A common set of grounded values.

Some foresaw this as the natural life history of a race, emerging from the planetary cradle to live in peace beneath the open stars. But Tor-speeding behind Gavin under the canopy of twisted metal-knew that humanity’s solution wasn’t the only one, or even common. Clearly, other makers had chosen different paths.

One day, long ago, terrible forces rained on this place, breaking a great seam into one side of the planetoid. Within, the cavity gave way to multiple, branching tunnels. Gavin braked before one of these, in a faint puff of gas, and pointed.

“We were surveying the first tunnels, when one of my deep-penetrating drones reported finding the habitats.”

Tor shook her head, still unable to believe it. She repeated the word.

“Habitats. As in closed rooms? Gas-tight for organic life support?”

Gavin’s faceplate hardly hid his exasperated expression. He shrugged. “Come on, Mother. I’ll show you.”

Tor numbly jetted along, following her partner into dark passages, headlamps illuminating the path ahead.

Habitats? In all the years humans had picked through asteroidal ruins, no one found anything having to do with biological beings. No wonder Gavin was testy. To an immature robot-person, it might seem like a bad joke.

Biological star-farers! It defied all logic. But soon Tor saw the signs… massive airlocks lying in dust, torn from their hinges… then reddish stains that could only come from oxidization of primitive rock, exposed to air. The implications were staggering. Something organic had come from the stars!

Though all humans were equal before law, the traditional biological kind still dominated culture in the solar system. Many younger Class AAAs looked to the future, when their descendants would be leaders, perhaps even star-treaders. To them, discovery of alien probes in the belt had been a sign. Of course, something terrible happened to the great robot envoys, a transition so awful that their era gave way to another-the age of little crystal virus-fomites. Nevertheless all these wrecked mechanical probes testified to what was physically possible. The galaxy still might-somehow-belong to humans made of metal and silicon.

Difficult and dangerous it might be, still, they appeared to be humanity’s future. Only here, deep in the planetoid, was an exception!

Tor moved carefully under walls carved out of carbonaceous rock. Mammoth explosions had shaken the habitat so that, even in vacuum, little was preserved from so long ago. Still, she could tell the machines in this area were different from any alien artifacts discovered before.

She traced the outlines of intricate separation columns. “Chemical-processing facilities… and not for fuel or cryogens, but complex organics!”

Tor hop-skipped from chamber to chamber as Gavin followed sullenly. A pack of semisent robots accompanied like sniffing dogs. In each new chamber they snapped, clicked, and scanned. Tor accessed data in her helmet display and inner percept.

“Look! In that chamber drones report organic compounds that have no business here. Heavy oxidation, within a super-reduced asteroid!” She hurried to an area where drones were already setting up lights. “See these tracks? They were cut by flowing water!” Tor knelt. “They had a stream, feeding recycled water into a little pond! Dust sparkled as it slid through her touch-sensitive prosthetic fingers. I’ll wager this was topsoil. And look, stems! From plants, and grass, and trees.”

“Put here for aesthetic purposes,” Gavin proposed. “We class AAAs are predesigned to enjoy nature as much as you biologicals…”

“Oh, posh!” Tor laughed. “That’s only a stopgap measure, till we’re sure you’ll keep thinking of yourselves as human beings. Nobody expects to inflict nostalgia for New England autumns on people when we become starships! Anyway, a probe could fulfill that desire by focusing a telescope on the Earth!”

She stood up and spread her arms. “This habitat was meant for biological creatures! Real, living aliens!”

Gavin frowned, but said nothing.

“Here,” Tor pointed as they entered another chamber. “Here is where the biological creatures were made! Don’t these machines resemble those artificial wombs they’ve started using on Luna Base?”

Gavin shrugged. “Maybe they were specialized units,” he suggested, “intended to work with volatiles. Or perhaps the type of starprobe that built this facility needed some element from the surface of a planet like Earth, and created workers equipped to go get it.”

Tor laughed. “It’s an idea. That’d be a twist, hm? Machines making biological units to do what they could not? And of course there’s no reason it couldn’t happen that way. Still, I doubt it.”

“Why?”

She turned to face her partner. “Because almost anything available on Earth you can synthesize in space. Anyway…”

Gavin interrupted. “Explorers! The probes were sent to acquire knowledge. All right then. If they wanted to learn more about Earth, they would send units formatted to live on its surface!”

Tor nodded. “Better,” she admitted. “But it still doesn’t wash.”

She knelt in the faint gravity and sketched an outline in the dust. “Here is the habitat, near the center of the asteroid. Now why would the parent probe have placed it here, except that it offers the best protection?

“Meanwhile, the daughter probes the parent was constructing lay out there in the open, vulnerable to cosmic rays and whatever other dangers prowled.”

Tor motioned upward with her prosthetic right claw. “If the biologicals were built just to poke briefly into a corner of this solar system, our Earth, would the parent probe have given them better protection than it offered its own children?

“No,” Tor concluded. “These ‘biologicals’ weren’t just exploration subunits. They were colonists!”

Gavin stood impassively for a long time, staring silently down at one of the shattered airlock hatches. Finally, he turned away. Radio waves carried to her augmented ears a vibration that her partner did not have to make, since he lacked lungs or any need for air. Yet, the sound amply expressed how he felt.

Gavin sighed.

THE LONELY SKY

Imagine we’re still in our own Age of Innocence, way back a generation ago-within living memory-when the universe seemed bright with every possibility.

At the time, a notion floated around, that machines might someday fly across the stars. And-by copying themselves-those envoys could spread wisdom across the galaxy. Perhaps it happened already.

And it had, many times! A great dispersion whose ultimate outcome wasn’t wisdom, but devastation. Of course we knew nothing about that. Back then, in our naivete, we pondered the silence! If alien machines lurked nearby, shouldn’t they have responded? Sure, we seem to have an explanation now. As I write this, I’m surrounded by wreckage from an ancient war. Mysterious adversaries wiped each other out, leaving none to tell the tale. But don’t you find such clean symmetry suspicious? Shouldn’t there have been survivors?

Even mutual annihilation generally leaves someone enduring amid the rubble! So let me propose a theory. One that many of you will find creepy. Worrisome.