The Island

life to learn its secrets. How does it work? How can it even live here at the edge of absolute zero, much less think? What vast, unfathomable intellect must it possess to see us coming from over half a lightyear away, to deduce the nature of our eyes and our instruments, to send a signal we can even detect, much less understand?

And what happens when we punch through it at a fifth the speed of light?

I call up the latest findings on my way to bed, and the answer hasn't changed: not much. The damn thing's already full of holes. Comets, asteroids, the usual protoplanetary junk careens through this system as it does through every other. Infra picks up diffuse pockets of slow outgassing here and there around the perimeter, where the soft vaporous vacuum of the interior bleeds into the harder stuff outside. Even if we were going to tear through the dead center of the thinking part, I can't imagine this vast creature feeling so much as a pinprick. At the speed we're going we'd be through and gone far too fast to overcome even the feeble inertia of a millimeter membrane.

And yet. Stop. Stop. Stop.

It's not us, of course. It's what we're building. The birth of a gate is a violent, painful thing, a spacetime rape that puts out almost as much gamma and X as a microquasar. Any meat within the white zone turns to ash in an instant, shielded or not. It's why we never slow down to take pictures.

One of the reasons, anyway.

We can't stop, of course. Even changing course isn't an option except by the barest increments. Eri soars like an eagle between the stars but she steers like a pig on the short haul; tweak our heading by even a tenth of a degree and you've got some serious damage at twenty percent lightspeed. Half a degree would tear us apart: the ship might torque onto the new heading but the collapsed mass in her belly would keep right on going, rip through all this surrounding superstructure without even feeling it.

Even tame singularities get set in their ways. They do not take well to change.

* * *

We resurrect again, and the Island has changed its tune.

It gave up asking us to stop stop stop the moment our laser hit its leading edge. Now it's saying something else entirely: dark hyphens flow across its skin, arrows of pigment converging towards some offstage focus like spokes pointing towards the hub of a wheel. The bullseye itself is offstage and implicit, far removed from 428's bright backdrop, but it's easy enough to extrapolate to the point of convergence six lightsecs to starboard. There's something else, too: a shadow, roughly circular, moving along one of the spokes like a bead running along a string. It too migrates to starboard, falls off the edge of the Island's makeshift display, is endlessly reborn at the same initial coordinates to repeat its journey.

Those coordinates: exactly where our current trajectory will punch through the membrane in another four months. A squinting God would be able to see the gnats and girders of ongoing construction on the other side, the great piecemeal torus of the Hawking Hoop already taking shape.

The message is so obvious that even Dix sees it. «Wants us to move the gate…» and there is something like confusion in his voice. «But how's it know we're building one?»

«The vons punctured it en route,» the chimp points out. «It could have sensed that. It has photopigments. It can probably see.»

«Probably sees better than we do,» I say. Even something as simple as a pinhole camera gets hi-res fast if you stipple a bunch of them across thirty million square kilometers.

But Dix scrunches his face, unconvinced. «So sees a bunch of vons bumping around. Loose parts — not that much even assembled yet. How's it know we're building something hot?»

Because it is very, very, smart, you stupid child. Is it so hard to believe that this, this — organism seems far too limiting a word — can just imagine how those half-built pieces fit together, glance at our sticks and stones and see exactly where this is going?

«Maybe's not the first gate it's seen,» Dix suggests. «Think there's maybe another gate out here?»

I shake my head. «We'd have seen the lensing artefacts by now.»

«You ever run into anyone before?»

«No.» We have always been alone, through all these epochs. We have only ever run away.

And then always from our own children.

I crunch some numbers. «Hundred eighty two days to insemination. If we move now we've only got to tweak our bearing by a few mikes to redirect to the new coordinates. Well within the green. Angles get dicey the longer we wait, of course.»

«We can't do that,» the chimp says. «We would miss the gate by two million kilometers.»

«Move the gate. Move the whole damn site. Move the refineries, move the factories, move the damn rocks. A couple hundred meters a second would be more than fast enough if we send the order now. We don't even have to suspend construction, we can keep building on the fly.»

«Every one of those vectors widens the nested confidence limits of the build. It would increase the risk of error beyond allowable margins, for no payoff.»

«And what about the fact that there's an intelligent being in our path?»

«I'm already allowing for the potential presence of intelligent alien life.»

«Okay, first off, there's nothing potential about it. It's right fucking there. And on our current heading we run the damn thing over.»

«We're staying clear of all planetary bodies in Goldilocks orbits. We've seen no local evidence of spacefaring technology. The current location of the build meets all conservation criteria.»

«That's because the people who drew up your criteria never anticipated a live Dyson sphere!» But I'm wasting my breath, and I know it. The chimp can run its equations a million times but if there's nowhere to put the variable, what can it do?

There was a time, back before things turned ugly, when we had clearance to reprogram those parameters. Before we discovered that one of the things the admins had anticipated was mutiny.

I try another tack. «Consider the threat potential.»

«There's no evidence of any.»

«Look at the synapse estimate! That thing's got orders of mag more processing power than the whole civilization that sent us out here. You think something can be that smart, live that long, without learning how to defend itself? We're assuming it's asking us to move the gate. What if that's not a request? What if it's just giving us the chance to back off before it takes matters into its own hands?»

«Doesn't have hands,» Dix says from the other side of the tank, and he's not even being flippant. He's just being so stupid I want to bash his face in.

I try to keep my voice level. «Maybe it doesn't need any.»

«What could it do, blink us to death? No weapons. Doesn't even control the whole membrane. Signal propagation's too slow.»

«We don't know. That's my point. We haven't even tried to find out. We're a goddamn road crew; our onsite presence is a bunch of construction vons press-ganged into scientific research. We can figure out some basic physical parameters but we don't know how this thing thinks, what kind of natural defenses it might have —»

«What do you need to find out?» the chimp asks, the very voice of calm reason.

We can't find out! I want to scream. We're stuck with what we've got! By the time the onsite vons could build what we need we're already past the point of no return! You stupid fucking machine, we're on track to kill a being smarter than all of human history and you can't even be bothered to move our highway to the vacant lot next door?

But of course if I say that, the Island's chances of survival go from low to zero. So I grasp at the only straw that remains: maybe the data we've got in hand is enough. If acquisition is off the table, maybe analysis will do.

«I need time,» I say.