Existence

challenges to miss by just enough…

… or so we are assured by the relic fragment LAWYER, offering excuses that most survivors accept, maintaining our agreement to keep silent, for now.

* * *

Enough. I have some notions I want to try out on other friends. My in-box is full of messages from human mayflies-flesh and blood men and women on the watery world-who correspond with me by old-fashioned email, the asynchronous channel that is least hampered by light-delay. Partners in discussion and conversation who are clueless about my real nature.

Well… not clueless. They’ve had hints. I give many! Is it my fault they choose to ignore them? For all their wit, these Earthlings think that I am one of them, even when I “pretend” not to be. Even when I say openly who I am and use my real name, they just laugh and go along with my “role-playing game.” Humoring my schtick, my cute charade as an ancient alien machine.

I’ve learned so much by using this approach.

I wonder why none of us thought of it, till the original challenge message taught us how.

Well. A good idea is a good idea-whatever its source.

78.

X SPECIES

War alert kept much of the crew at emergency stations, long after the crisis in belt zone H-27 passed. With Tor Povlov and Gavin AInsworth back aboard their ship, patched and plugged into recovery units, the Warren Kimbel reported no further hostile activity, while sifting for pieces of the FACR- marauder.

If it really was a Faction-Allied Competition Remover, after all.

Gerald felt doubtful that definition applied in this case. For one thing, space crystals were fewer where the Warren Kimbel’s crew had gone exploring, in the middle belt. Out there, most of the wreckage seemed to be from a much older conflict, between mighty starship-machines.

Whatever the killbot’s motives were, we gathered some pretty good data about them this time. And we’ll learn more, when the fragments are analyzed.

If only somebody would capture one alive… still active and thinking, perhaps even able to speak. Could we persuade it to tell us what happened here, so long ago?

Providing the damned thing even remembers.

Gerald privately suspected, the ancient, nasty war machines might just be acting out of reflex. Or else they went mad long ago. What intelligence could survive a thousand thousand centuries of tedium?

If it were up to him, Gerald would order stand-down from war alert. But as expedition leader, he still deferred to Captain Kim when it came to ship operations. Anyway, a little stress was good for a crew. This had been no more than a small skirmish compared to what the Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta might face on her next cruise to the outer belt and beyond. Perhaps a few drifting FACRs were all that remained of prehistoric combatants that once clashed across the solar system. On the other hand, there might still be terrible forces out there in the reaches, coiled and waiting. We’ll see-

– assuming we don’t dissolve into chaos first, back home on Earth.

Which reminded Gerald.

I had an incoming transmission from Ben Flannery that got interrupted by the crisis. Ben seemed worried… when the alarms dragged me off. At which point, everybody aboard, even researchers, devoted full attention to events happening three light-minutes-almost half an astronomical unit-away.

Through a viewer-port, Gerald saw the Lacey Donaldson Array gradually swinging the vast umbrella of mirror- petals back to its former configuration, as a scientific instrument gathering data about other planetary systems. The big telescope wasn’t supposed to be tested as a weapon so soon. Now, its secondary purpose was no longer secret. Whatever or whoever lurked in the asteroid belt would realize-Earthlings were preparing big guns, right here in the neighborhood.

The bridge crew looked tired, but still taut. Even Captain Kim still seemed high on adrenaline, chewing at a cuticle while her percept zone filled with floating holo images and post-analyses of the time-delayed FACR battle. Simulations flashed too quickly for Gerald and his older augmentations to keep up. Well, some newfangled things aren’t meant for old farts like me.

Gerald was already off-duty and Kim apparently had things well in hand, so he turned without ceremony and kick-floated toward his quarters, where Ben’s message waited. Along the way, passing the main science station, he found Ika and Hiram goofing around, amusing their crewmates and relieving tension with a little performance- holding a backward conversation with every word, every sound reversed in time. Gerald had to smile at this strange friendship between Neanderthal girl and autistic boy. Clearly, diversity was its own reward.

But no dolphins.

If they stick some kind of superfish aboard my next command, I’ll quit.

You had to draw a line somewhere.

Ika caught his eye as he drifted past and-without pausing in her backward-chatter-she wink-picted at Gerald. A tiny, shimmering glyph appeared to float from her eye to his, settling in the corner of his percept. It unfolded when he glanced at it, and said:

Mr. C awaits at the same place!

Gerald mused on her meaning as he flew from handhold to handhold, toward the spinning axle of the gravity wheel.

Oh. Yes. Mr. C.

Mr. Cobbly. For some reason, Ika still seemed keen for him to try out the blind-spot trick. So simple even an inept Homo sapiens should be capable of not-seeing something that wasn’t there.

Well, maybe. Now that the crisis is over.

Just to make her happy.

After I take care of other business. And sleep.

Descending one of the spoke ladders to the rim of the rotating wheel, Gerald had to concentrate in order to get his legs set under him. Even at a quarter-G, just standing up seemed to get stranger and more difficult with time- remembering to heed the quaint direction down. Someday, he might even stop coming here, and become a permanent resident of weightless space. A fine way for an astronaut to finish off his career, self-exiled forever from his homeworld.

Heck, would there even be a habitable Earth anymore, in a few years’ time? Some of the worries from his youth-energy, pollution, and terrorism-now seemed less dire. But each year brought more dilemmas to light, some unknown to other generations, feeding the public’s dread of extinction-

– and stoking interest, among millions, in the seductive way out, offered by star-crystals.

Relearning the art of walking, Gerald hobbled gingerly past the same stretch of corridor where Ika and Hiram insisted that a “cobbly” still lurked. Doesn’t an imaginary nonentity from the Paleolithic have better nonthings to not-do than waiting around here to not-converse with me? And does this mean Neanderthals were the first mystic-gurus? Teaching that one path to wisdom is looking-away?

Entering his quarters for the first time in twenty hours, he found above his desk the holo-head of his friend the anthropologist, frozen mid-sentence since the war-alert wailed. Next to Flannery hovered a chart mapping the political fluxes that roiled Planet Earth-blobs of color, jostling across several cubic meters of Gerald’s stateroom.

After visiting the fresher, Gerald grabbed a bulb of yeast-boost juice before slumping into his hammock.

“Resume.”