A FAREWELL TO STARS

Experiment File #: 486

Experiment Name: Takiya Naru

Experiment Classification: Prototype AI (human emulator, organic shell)

Experiment Status: missing

In the dark, with every light powered off, I can see the stars between my feet: Sirius, Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, Rigel, all shimmering through the water of the bath. The bottom of my tub, a sheet of transparent aluminum, is part of the station's outer hull, and the abyss of space is inches beneath my vulnerable human soles.

Experiment Description: To address issues of treachery/desertion in human-emulator AI, prototype 486 [Takiya Naru] has been programmed to believe itself human.

The following is its final record:

"Soto?" I call, standing up in the starlit water. "My implant just chirped. Could you read me the message please?"

The computer's voice answers, "Subject line: specter sighting. Message content: Hunter, in the interest of your time, I will omit all preamble: our station, The Halcyon Abyss, requires the services of an exterminator specializing in specters. Reply speedily if possible; situation is time-sensitive."

"Halcyon?" I say, shaking my head. "Soto, isn't that an old nature preserve?"

"Correct. Purpose: to prevent the extinction of potentially useful aquatic animal species. Human population: zero. Logs claim it has not been visited in 400 years. Status: abandoned."

I stir the water, imagining whales swimming between the shimmering stars. "No human staff there?"

"Negative. Station was designed to be self-sustaining. The interior is entirely submerged."

"Hmm." I sink back into the cooling liquid, frowning. "And the message really came from Halcyon? Not just from the space nearby?"

"Confirmed. Transmission originated from a point 11 meters inside the station."

"Send a message back. Say I need to know something about the situation before I agree."

"Impossible."

"Why?"

"It would violate programmed restrictions. Explanation: clearing a message through the hull of The Halcyon Abyss would require an electromagnetic signal of a prohibited intensity."

"Why prohibited?"

"The Halcyon Abyss was designed to protect alien animal species highly vulnerable to extinction, including those thought to be sensitive to electromagnetic radiation."

"I see. So we can't scan it then, either."

A black box. Dangerous.

But ghost jobs always are.

"Do we at least have old blueprints?" I ask.

The darkness shimmers with threads of blue, and a translucent cylinder appears over the surface of the water. I use my implant to zoom in. The schematics of the hull are detailed, but the interior is an empty void. "Know what I don't see?"

"You do not see a transmissions device."

"Right." I use my implant to command the tub to drain, and then step into the nearby closet-slot, where I have the machine-arms outfit me in an aquatic evo-suit. "I’m going to take a look. Charge the railgun, Soto."

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"Acknowledged. Do not attempt this."

I climb a ladder through the low ceiling, the gravity weakening as I ascend toward the station's center. "It's my job. I appreciate your concern." I shake my head to myself. Why do they program these things to simulate concern? Even if some AI are sentient (improbable), they wouldn't share the feelings of terrestrial apes like us.

"Railgun prepared."

Reaching the top of the ladder in zero-G, I climb through the hatch and slot myself into a coffin-sized pod of transparent metal, a place simultaneously claustrophobic and seemingly open to the star-speckled void. A part of me believes that there is no pod at all, and that I am floating, barefaced, in hard vacuum.

"Do not attempt this. The Halcyon Abyss contains no intelligent life; therefore, there is no person who will benefit from the risk."

"I doubt a plankton sent that message. Fire me down."

Gravity returns swiftly, pressing my feet against the invisible floor, hard at first, then harder, crushing, two Gs… six Gs… ten Gs. Through gritted teeth, I murmur, "I'll never understand how this doesn't pancake my insides."

"Information regarding genetic enhancement—"

"Locked, I know."

The gray circle of my station, my isolated home, dwindles down to a speck, and disappears. Somewhere in the dark, the last ring of accelerators flickers past, and I'm no longer speeding up, I'm weightless, in free-fall, plummeting through the void.

Swarms of silhouettes flicker before the stars, thousands of fragments of rock, the remnants of Earth, still lingering in the old orbit of the planet. I imagine each fragment as a place that once existed: Rome, tumbling darkly before Polaris; China, glowing redly, speckled in globs of the nickel-iron core; Everest, crumbling into the abyss, like a handful of black dust falling between shadowed fingers.

"Soto," I say, "the aquatic species on the Halcyon: could any of them have been mistaken for animals? Could they have been intelligent after all?"

The computer takes a moment to respond, since I am already a light-second away from it. "Improbable. Even if that were true, materials to construct a transmissions array would not be available within the habitat."

That eliminates one possibility. And it would be ludicrous to suppose that intelligence could have evolved there in the last four hundred years. No, the blueprints are outdated: the Halcyon is not empty, not anymore.

The black box has been used to conceal something.

In the old days, when a ghost hunter stumbled onto a government secret, they could call the local jurisprudence station and receive clearance and information. Nowadays, it's difficult to contact any of the fractured governments, and besides, none of them have records about what the old government was up to. No one even has a plausible theory.

If Halcyon has live personnel, they're a remnant of the old days. And if they've been under strict radio silence, it's possible they don't even know that their era has passed.

"Soto, I know you can't override your programming, but what about my implant? Could it transmit through the Halcyon's hull?"

The silence stretches… tick-tick-tick-tick… and then, "Negative."

I let out a sigh. "Then if I'm going in blind, at least brief me on what we do know. Are there any large predators I should be worried about?"

A ten ton lobster crawls through the shadows between the stars, although I know it's actually being projected onto my retinas by the bionics in my eyeballs. Other monsters loom up from the darkness: bone-masked squid, eel-sharks with ten thousand teeth, towering masses of seaweed with strangling tongues. Soto warns me about the predators' camouflage, their quickness, their insidious instincts, trying to frighten me.

"I'm not turning around, Soto. How long until arrival?"

The silence returns, and drags on longer than ever, lonely…

If I think about it, I am always alone, but with Soto nearby it doesn't feel that way. Here, hurtling silently through the black tunnel of the void, I'm suddenly conscious of how far I am from another human being. Probably, there are still survivors in the Earth system, but I can't prove that. The last time I saw a human face was four months ago, on a hunt, and it was dead. I had arrived at the station to find everyone frozen: the ghost had sabotaged the life-support, and was hovering half inside the corpses, the way they do. Like they're sucking something out. I had paralyzed it with my diffusion array and exorcised it, then ordered the station railgun to fire the corpses into a fragment of the Earth, burying them where our ancestors are buried.

"Thirty-nine seconds."

The Halcyon Abyss is not yet visible, but swarms of shattered debris are already flickering past, hazardous. Tiny pinging sounds crack through the silence, microparticles flashing like sparks against the hull, leaving almost invisible gouges in the thin surface.

The debris are from the old Dyson swarm, a shell of satellites and stations that encloses the sun, and once drew power from it. Halcyon is part of that shell. I skim over a sea of defunct solar panels, billions upon billions of them, a fragile skin of metal wider than a thousand worlds, shimmering in the starlight like an ocean at night. The surface is broken by waves and shining spray where the alien kill bullets had blasted through on their way to obliterate their various targets: Earth, Mars, Haven-central, Luna, Spindisk, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Ever since, the satellites have been colliding, and with every collision, more debris tumbles randomly into the swarm, and those debris cause more collisions. The whole sphere is slowly but exponentially spiraling into a chain-reaction of silent, irreversible ruin.

I feel my body pulled upside down, the stars whirling, then stabilizing. This is the first stage of landing on a station: the receiving railgun automatically aligns with the incoming pod; then the first ring of accelerator magnets sets the vessel spinning, and the second ring stabilizes it, so that the passenger's feet are in the direction that is about to feel like down.

And now, the gravity comes—hard at first, then harder, like a boulder crushing me, and as I groan under the pressure, I get my first look at the Halcyon Abyss.

It is a deeper darkness within the shadow of the swarm. Black-holes lost in outer space must look this way—just an emptiness, a hole, a drain. As it creeps nearer, more and more stars are swallowed by its rim, until the whole of the sky before me has gone dark. I always imagined the kill bullets like this, hulking, black-painted cylinders, immense slugs of wolfram or simple brute iron. Humanity never got a clear look at the bullets, but everyone sees them in their nightmares.

Noiselessly, the pod slips into the mouth of the cylinder, and all goes dark. Gravity has shifted again, presumably toward the nearest rim of the spinning station, and I am lying on my face. If the blueprints were accurate, I'm in a tiny cargo receptacle, an airlock near the gigantic turbines that keep the ocean oxygenated.

This is my last chance to speak to Soto, before I descend through the shell of lead.

But there's nothing to say.

Eventually, I send, "Wish me luck."

Seconds tick by in the darkness. I can feel the subsonic thrumming of the turbines. Silent.

Loud in my bones.

Soto answers, "You have sufficient oxygen?" It is a question without purpose; Soto knows better than I do what my equipment kit contains.

"A hundred hours," I answer, fitting the oxygen mask over my head.

Just before I open the hatch, the final message comes back. "Luck."

Then I plunge down into the Abyss.