Existence

will do what’s required.

We’ll throw you the biggest party in history! Or else arrange for discretion, safety, and comfort. Whatever works for you.

If, in the face of an offer like that, you still refuse to come forward honestly, and continue afflicting us with rude vexations, then we’ve settled what you are. And we have just one thing to add.

Go away!

Consider that maliciousness inevitably has consequences. Ask your parents, guardians, or other responsible adults to please talk to us, instead.

And if you turn down this request? Choosing to keep teasing and poking? Well, just you wait.

81.

EXPLORERS

Third shift aboard the Sol System cruiser Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta. A time when all scientists, researchers, and regular staff were in their hammocks, wired for enhanced sleep- recharging bodies and brains-while the small downtime-crew performed upkeep chores. Swapping and testing modules, processing recyclables, shifting around fuel, waste, and other fluids, rough tasks that were banished to the small hours, because they might disturb delicate experiments with sloshing, gurgling vibrations. Everyone got used to such soft sounds muttering away during third shift. The music of maintenance.

For Gerald, it was time to perform “unique functions.” Those that called for-

Well, “secrecy” was too obscene a word, nowadays. “Discretion” better fit the operation that he now supervised from the bridge, while Captain Kim and most of her officers dozed below.

Of course, this is why they keep coming back to me. The reason humanity’s most-elite conspiracy keeps sending me out here. Because I’m a sneaky bastard, with my generation’s easy knack for lying.

Just three others shared this bridge watch with Gerald, all of them members of his close-knit team. Jenny Peng wore a floppy sweatshirt with a pixilated penguin roaming actively across the folds of cloth. She monitored the Big Eye Telescope, preparing it for special duty similar to its role as a weapon, a while back.

Ika, the young Neanderthal, drifted nearby, her fingernails and toenails bearing active paint that both sparkled and tracked her limbs’ every surge or twitch, transforming them into subtle commands. Meanwhile Hiram, the autistic savant, immersed under a total vir-hood, whimpered and moaned in one of the dialects of his race, a language that other generations mistook for defective nonsense-monitoring too many inputs for Gerald, or even most computers, to comprehend.

A very small team, capable of acting in place of many. They had practiced this operation back in Earth orbit, and again several shifts ago-before the FACR fight. Now, it was time to launch Operation Probe.

Taking a key from a chain around his neck, Gerald reached under the nearby console and turned a hidden lock. Simultaneously he sent a simple code-pict to the ship’s core. A faint rumble followed.

Through the big control center window, with unobstructed real eyes reacting to sun-propelled photons, he watched one flank of the ibn Battuta slowly open along a seam-a crease that few even knew was there. Unfolding like a movie robot, or the cargo bay doors of some ancient bomber-plane, twin panels turned to lay bare slim payloads. Four metal tubes, each of them not much bigger than a tall man.

It couldn’t amount to much, or the bean counters would notice. But we can pass off the sudden disappearance of a few hundred kilos. Call it a garbage toss. The bookkeeping is already arranged.

One by one, the tubes slid free of the panels that had sheltered them, innocuously, all the way from Earth. Soon, at a nudge command from Ika’s left foot, each of them lit up at one end-firing small rockets. The slender cylinders didn’t have far to go. Just a few dozen kilometers. Gerald watched them diminish rapidly, aimed generally toward the Big Eye.

Okay, it’s my turn.

He clicked some teeth and grunted a few old-fashioned subvocal commands. The real world faded and his percept filled with sixty-four little frames, each of them emulating a human face.

The expedition commanders.

“Okay, you’re all awake, I see,” he murmured in throat-speech. “Each of you should be ready to deploy in less than an hour. Any problems to report?”

Most of the figures simply shook their heads or indicated a simple “negative” response, by quick-code. A few were more verbose.

“No difficulties, Commodore Livingstone.”

“Ready, operational, and eager, Gerald.”

“All is copasetic, sahib!”

“Ikimasho. Let’s go.”

“Coo-yah, dis be one tallowah-good vessel, mon. A big-up on all you bredren! Luck an’ more time to come.”

That last came from a dusky visage with what looked like waving snakes for hair. Gerald allowed himself a twitch of amusement. Despite all surface appearances, he had confidence in that captain. In all of them, for that matter. After a lengthy selection process, these duplicate personalities had been chosen for certain traits. Among them reliability. And bottomless curiosity.

“All right then. Your carrier rockets will release you, one by one, changing course between each drop. At the arranged point, you’ll deploy sails.”

It wasn’t necessary to say any of that. But Gerald judged it best to maintain a sense of ritual, treating these ersatz beings like people till the end. Real or not, they were brave souls.

“Good luck. And in posterity’s name, I thank you all.”

This time, all sixty-four took turns responding verbally.

“Bon chance, toutes amis!”

“All best and tallyho.”

“It may not be to infinity, droozhya, but anything is better than Siberia.”

“Joyous travels, comrades!”

And so on. Sixty-four benedictions unrolled, as each persona bade the others farewell and signed off. It would be years before they reported back again.

Hiram moaned and thrashed a bit. Ika answered with correcting waggles of her fingers and toes. “Okay, okay! I’m adjusting thrust vectors on carrier number four. It’ll be all right. In fact, we’ll drop the first package from carrier two… now!”

The slim, man-size rockets were already beyond sight, except each time one of them briefly glimmered with a course-altering pulse. From these brief flickers-and the detailed data streaming through his percept-Gerald could tell that the first one was heading into a zone somewhat “above” and beyond the Donaldson-Chang Array. Another plunged at an angle just “below” and past the giant, multipetaled mirror. Numbers three and four were veering left and right, giving little bursts to alter direction each time they let go of a cargo capsule.

Gerald’s in-eye depicted the pattern as four sprays, each consisting of sixteen rays, spreading like the seeds of a dandelion, except that all sixty-four tiny packets forged “ahead” of the huge telescope, aiming both solar-outward and along the direction of orbit. The general way you must go, if you want to leave the inner solar system behind.

It was time to ask. “Are we charged up?”

Jenny Peng had her mother’s exotic, Hunan beauty, but her father’s easy-going Sichuan smile. Gerald recalled with some fondness how Peng Xiang Bin used to wear a similar expression, taking everything in stride, during those first tense weeks of the Great Debate-back when humanity’s fate hung on pitting his “worldstone” against Gerald’s Havana Artifact. It was a frustrating time, when both Courier of Caution and the simulated beings within the other