Analog SFF, March 2012 Read online

“How can you be fired? It's your company. You founded it. You're CEO.”

  The guards shoved the last boxes into truck. They turned away without salutation. I pulled the clattering door closed, then told Karen, “Most of it is owned by venture capitalists and they just decided that my microbots will be better weapons than surgeons. I disagreed. I was voted out.”

  She looked back at the factory building, from which I now was banned. The guards went through the steel exit door as we watched. They didn't even deign to look back once. I imagined them throwing the deadbolt after the door clicked shut.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “So am I.” I fished in my pocket for the key to the rental truck, hanging from a dingy glow-in-the-dark keychain. I had to admire the cold calculation with which my company's board had prepared: the truck was rented and waiting here in the parking lot while they fired me. “Well, this reunion has been great.”

  “Wait.” She took a step forward. “I came to ask for your help.”

  “With what?”

  “Something unbelievable.”

  “You coming back here is unbelievable. But here you are.”

  “You know I wouldn't come back here, to bother you, unless it was something . . . unless it was so big that you and I don't matter in comparison.”

  “Is there something that we did matter in comparison to?” I asked. Seeing Karen now only piled a sense of failure atop my sense of righteous anger. I really wanted to turn away. It would be nice if, this time, I was the one with the dignity and indifference. And yet, I couldn't help myself. Before she could answer my sarcasm, I added, “Tell me about it.”

  “I couldn't possibly.” She looked toward a silver Audi waiting on the pavement a few dozen paces away. “I'd have to show you. But it . . .” She sighed, then started over. “I know I haven't been a good friend these last couple years, Steve. But I need your help. And I promise you, I promise you, you won't regret it. I promise you that I can show you the most amazing thing you have ever seen. Only . . . I need to take a couple days of your time.”

  I laughed. “Yesterday that would have been utterly impossible. I wouldn't have thought I could spare a couple hours in the next year. So maybe this is your lucky day. Follow me home, let me change into something more dignified, and then tell me what you can.”

  * * * *

  “This is too long,” I told Karen, late the next afternoon, as she turned the car off the narrow paved road that we'd been climbing, and onto a pitted dirt track. We were moving slow enough now that I rolled down the window. Tall pines crowded the narrow way, and their scent quickly filled the car.

  “I told you it would take a few hours to drive out here,” she said. The road narrowed to a path. The bottom of the car scraped over a root. An Audi coupe was not the car for this kind of driving.

  “Yes. You did. But five hours is longer than I remembered. I've been working night and day on that start-up company for a year. Time is new to me. I've forgotten what it's like for it to shamble along.”

  She'd followed me home the previous morning, told me what to pack, and picked me up again the next day at dawn. I'd turned my phone off; an evening of sympathy phone calls from former employees and fellow engineers was all I could stomach. Breakfast on the road and a long drive had passed with us reminiscing about graduate school. But the whole time, she managed to deflect every question about the waiting surprise. She displayed impressive will power.

  We came to the top of a rise, and she took the car out of gear. When it drifted to a stop, she jerked the emergency brake on.

  “Is this it? The middle of a single-lane dirt road in the forest? We've arrived?”

  “Almost. But first, I need your word of honor that you'll keep secret what I'm about to show you.”

  “Come on, Karen, this is too much. Whatever it is can't be that big a deal.”

  “It's the biggest deal ever. Now, come on, I'm not pulling out non-disclosure agreements and asking you to sign, even though I should. I'm only asking for your word.”

  I looked down the road, where it turned around some firs with branches nodding now in the September breeze. Karen was a paleontologist. The idea that she found something in the Adirondacks worth this much overture seemed ridiculous. I started to worry I was an easy dupe: first the venture capitalists make a fool of me, now my old love makes a fool of me. . . .

  “Come on,” I said. “You find a dinosaur skull or something? Who would I tell about that? I don't know anyone who would care. But you have my word. Your cryptosaur bones are safe with me.”

  “No dinosaurs in here. The rock up in these hills is more than five hundred million years old. It's Ediacarian. What do you know about the Ediacarian?”

  “Never heard the word before.”

  “It's an era. Pre-pre-Cambrian.”

  “Alright. So. Nothing around back then but bacteria, right? What do you call those colonies of bacteria? Stromatolites?”

  “There might've been a bit more than that in the Ediacarian. Some complex structures that might be proto-animals, or at least unusually complex bacterial colonies, have been found in Ediacarian rock in Australia and Africa. Spongelike creatures.”

  “Okay,” I said, “so you found a big sponge?”

  “No.” She opened the door, climbed out, closed it, and leaned down in the open window. She looked me in the eye a full ten seconds before she said, “I found a machine. A five-hundred-and-fifty-million-year-old machine.”

  * * * *

  I followed her down the narrowing path, our steps silent on the thick layer of soft pine needles. A wind had started. The path wound through an outcropping of smooth stone surrounded by bending pines, and then descended toward a narrow depression. I heard fabric snapping in the wind before I saw the tent. But then we turned a bend and before us, in a small clearing, a large blue tent stood by a black heap of campfire ashes. Shards of pale stone were strewn on the ground around the ashes and the tent. The clean, sharp flakes had no lichen on them: they had been chipped off of some other stone very recently.

  Karen looked around, visibly relieved that no one was here. Then she zipped the tent flap up, and I stepped inside.

  She had cut the floor of the tent away. At our feet lay exposed stone. The close air of the tent smelled of powdered stone and hydraulic oil, mixed still with the scent of pine. Most of the stone beneath us had been chipped away with precision jackhammers. It looked like she had been working to remove a sample, cutting a neat rectangle out of the bedrock.

  But there, in the center of the square cut, something shimmering and gold stuck out of the newly exposed stone.

  It looked like a flattened nose cone, sleek and smooth, about fifty centimeters long, and sticking about ten centimeters up out of the rock. I bent over and stared. Pale gold lines traced complex patterns on the surface. The patterns reminded me of a silicon chip, except that the lines crossed back and forth at every angle.

  I stared for what seemed an eternity. Probably ten minutes. My mouth became dry, because I stood there so long with it hanging open. Walking down from the car, I had pictured some gray lines in stone that she was going to claim were the impression of a machine. I didn't expect something . . . intact.

  “What is it?” I finally whispered.

  “Old,” she whispered back.

  “It looks . . . aerodynamic. Like it flew here and crashed.”

  “This stone has no signs of unconformities, no sign of being moved by an impact. This stone formed around the machine.”

  “We don't know that it's a machine,” I said.

  “Oh, come on.” She pointed at it emphatically. “I grant that the Design Argument fails. But still, you find a watch on a beach and you know it's been designed. You find this thing in the rock, and you know it's been manufactured. This is not a fossil. It's not an organism, right? It's a machine.”

  It sure looked like a machine.

  “How long have you . . . had this exposed?”

  “Three weeks.”


  “And where's your team?”

  “I had students working on the cut. There were surface features we wanted to pull out. But then their summer semester ended. By myself I pulled the stone that had rested on this. I used a winch. I thought I was just cleaning up. But instead I found this.”

  “Wow.”

  So her mind had been racing with the possibilities for weeks. And, I thought with a pang, it had taken her weeks to decide to come to me. Had she tried to get help from other people before getting around to asking me? Maybe some other past lovers?

  Focus, I told myself. Try to bring some perspective. “It looks to be in excellent condition. It can't be five hundred million years old. Suppose it is a machine. Could it have . . . burrowed here?”

  “There are no fractures. No cracks. No powdered stone. Nothing like that.”

  “Could it have . . . teleported here? Into the rock?”

  “I . . . “ she hesitated, squinting in thought. “I didn't think of that. I mean, teleportation. That's kind of off the wall, right?”

  “Yes. But so is a five-hundred-million-year-old-but-still-intact machine.”

  “Five hundred and fifty,” she said. “Anyway, if this thing beamed down or whatever, what about the rock that was here then? It should have been pushed aside or something, right? So we'd see fractures.”

  “Who knows?” I said. I was just trying to pressure test her claim. Who could judge which was the most parsimonious hypothesis: a machine that could survive more than five hundred million years of crushing geological changes, or a machine that teleported from somewhere—another dimension? outer space?—and maybe switched with the matter already there?

  I stared. I paced around it in a circle, pondering. But finally another question intruded into the wonder of it.

  “What are you planning to do? I mean, you have to get a team up here, right? Or wait for your students to come back. Or something.”

  “No team,” she said. “This is state land here in the Adirondacks. We announce the machine, the government takes this away from us immediately.”

  “You want to cut it out, tote it away?”

  “Maybe. But who knows how big it is? How far into the stone it goes? It may not be an easy matter to cut it out.”

  “Hey—wait—hasn't the semester started already?”

  “I called in sick.”

  “For the whole semester?”

  “I told them I had cancer.”

  I shook my head. I didn't know where to begin on that one. A lie that big was going to cause her trouble. But another question struck me as more pressing: “Why do you need me?”

  She bent over and pointed at the front of the sleek nose cone. We had to get down on our hands and knees on the hard stone to peer at it: a small square outline was just visible. A strange pattern of dots surrounded it, mirror imaged on each side:

  .

  . .

  . . .

  . . . . .

  . . . . . . .

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  “Primes,” I said.

  She nodded, and tapped the small square area with her finger thirteen times.

  It disappeared, leaving a gaping square of dark about the size of two postage stamps.

  “Whoa,” I said. “Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. It still . . . does things.”

  She nodded. “The front door.”

  “Oh,” I moaned, shocked as everything fell into place. I sat back on my knees and pressed my hands to my forehead. “I thought you were going to ask me for money. I thought you were going to ask me to fund you.”

  “No,” she said.

  “You want my robots.”

  She nodded. “I want your robots.”

  “You want to go in,” I said.

  “I want to go in.”

  The next day we stood on a busy sidewalk in Boston, staring up at a dingy factory building.

  “I'm having second thoughts,” Karen said.

  “Don't,” I told her.

  “We bring in another person, we exponentially increase our chances of a leak. Let's just do it the slow way.”

  “You asked for my help, this is the way I say we have to do it. This guy is the best. With him, we'll be exponentially more efficient. Besides, three is a good number. One for base while two ride the bots. Come on.”

  I pulled her along a pitted sidewalk to a heavy green door. Thick wire-threaded windows, the muntins caked along their edges with a heavy history of dimly colored industrial paints, looked onto a dim hall and stairs. I pushed an old-fashioned black buzzer that hung uneasily in its mount. There was no sound: no way to know if the thing worked. But after a moment the door hummed and clicked, then drifted open.

  We climbed the broad steps. A door stood ajar on the first landing. Through it we could see a big room punctuated with tall windows rising over a procession of work benches. Halogen bulbs strung on naked wires blazed down at us.

  We went in, then pressed the door closed behind us. The space seemed even bigger now. I-beams thrust through the floor at seemingly random places held up a two-story ceiling clotted with exposed ducts and wires and pipes. Tools hung along the walls between the windows, below flat wall monitors displaying strange algorithms working silently. The air smelled of solder and—it took me a minute to place the smell—sage.

  We took a few steps toward the windows. “Is that them?” Karen asked, nodding toward a rack of what looked like black clothes, standing by a tool cart.

  “Best VR suits in the world. Unbelievably smooth pressure feedback. But those are off the rack. The point is that this guy's software is even better. This guy is the best interface man on the planet.”

  “Hey!” a voice called from a far corner. A wheelchair shot toward us. A heavy man with long black hair and a thick beard slammed his palms into the wheels, speeding forward. He seized the wheels and skidded to a stop just inches before our shins.

  “How are things, Steven?”

  He held out a hand. I shook. “Things are interesting.”

  “Poor bastard. I saw what those venture capitalists did to you.”

  “That's on the boards already? Well. So: Daltry Ericson, this is Karen. Karen and I went to grad school together.”

  Daltry looked at her frankly, shook her hand, and then turned back to me. “You want something to drink? Cappuccino? While I make it you can tell me the deal.”

  Daltry always started right in. He didn't really know how to do small talk. Or maybe didn't care to do it.

  “That'd be great,” I said.

  “Wet or dry?”

  I looked at Karen. When she shrugged I explained: “Lots of milk or not much milk?”

  “Wet,” she said.

  “Three wets. Follow me. Talk.”

  We walked quickly, struggling to keep up as he sped across the heavy planks of the old industrial floor and into a corner kitchen. The kitchen was surprising clean for the pad of a bachelor ubergeek. Polished tile stretched into dust-free corners. Bright copper pans hung over a low gas stove. There were flower pots on the windowsill, and they were full of herbs. While Daltry worked a frightening Italian chrome machine, I told him, “We have a device. Unknown provenience. Unique, in every possible sense you can imagine. We want to reverse engineer it in a non-destructive way.”

  “A dive inside?”

  “Right. My bots, your suits. Secret location, very tight non-disclosure agreements.”

  He sniffed. “Sounds dubious.”

  “I can promise you it is not illegal,” Karen said.

  “Well, careful,” I said. With Daltry, it was important to be very precise. He was screwed a few times on contracts, and so he thought now that anyone he caught fudging was secretly a pathological liar. “There is a chance that the government could try to claim the machine from us, or at least complain that we didn't share earlier.”

  Daltry nodded. I knew the idea of beating the government to something would appeal to his anarchistic side.

  “I could do it in the Spring,�
�� he said. “Maybe. I'd need to know more.”

  “We have to do it now,” Karen said, looking at me. There was a hint of anger in her voice: I had dragged us all the way to Boston for this.

  “She's right,” I said. “It must be now. The day after tomorrow. I'll need tomorrow to gather the robots and the other equipment we'll need. But then we pick you up and we leave.”

  “I have such responsibilities that starting anything new the day after tomorrow would cost an insane amount, just to pay off the contractual obligations I have.”

  “No,” I said. “Here's the deal. You come with us, bring all the gear you can. Give us a week. I'll pay your expenses.”

  “Now you're insulting me,” he said. He started frothing milk. The machine roared. I waited till it quieted down before I finished: “And, and, if you don't say, on the first day—no, if you don't say in the first hour—'Steven this is the most interesting, the most important thing I have ever done in my life,’ then I'll pay you whatever you want.”

  “I want a lot.”

  “I still own 38 percent of my company. I'll give it to you.”

  “I.P.O. date?”

  “June.”

  He looked at me, at Karen, back and forth, the metal frothing cup forgotten in his hand. “Man, you must think you got something really interesting.”

  “Oh,” Karen said, “you have no idea.”

  * * * *

  Daltry wouldn't let me push his wheelchair. When we finally returned to the camp—his van following Karen's Audi—and climbed down from the cars, he shot ahead of us and half-slid down the hill to the tent, wheels churning pine needles.

  “This is it?” he asked dubiously, as I reached for the zipper on the tent flap. “You decided to hide your machine in the woods?” He spun in place, working his arms in contrary directions, crushing pine needles under wheel as he took in the whole rustic scene. “There's nothing here. What if that fuel cell of yours doesn't pump enough juice? This is a stupid way to hide your device.”

  “We're not hiding it,” I said. “It's stuck in the stone.”

  “What?”

  I held up the flap. He rolled in. He stopped at the edge of the cut, his wheels balanced precariously on the lip of stone. He stared a long time, silent. Then he circled the device slowly, wheeling around the pit. Finally he whispered, “It's extraterrestrial, isn't it? Is it extraterrestrial? It's alien.”