Drifting Read online

  Drifting Dave Cook and Matthew Drury

  © 2013 Dave Cook and Matthew Drury, All Rights Reserved.

  Cover illustration by Ryan Valle

  http://driftingnovel.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Dedicated to Marvin Minsky and Joseph F. Engelberger, who epitomize (respectively) the theory and practice of robotics

  I

  An eternal dreamer.

  Endlessly sleeping, endlessly dreaming.

  What if someone offered you this life in Limbo? Would you take it? Imagine living in a world that you control, where you can have any experience you want: a utopia. Sure, they aren’t real life experiences - but what if you didn’t know that? What if, like this dreamer, you thought it was real? Would you take it then? Or would there be something pitiful about being a prisoner in Limbo, forced to think that your eternal dream was real? Would you really want to live in Limbo anyway? Is a utopia even possible? If not, why even strive toward one? Perhaps because there is no choice but to dream...

  This android has dreamed for countless millennia. But what exactly is an android’s dream? Does it really occur in the artificial neurons while it sleeps? Or is it programmed from the outside?

  How sad it is to see the petals fall from a once magnificent flower. Its time of beauty slipping away, but I remember its finest hour.

  I’m sure I felt the earth shake as each petal kissed the ground.

  No sense of the passage of time as it cast its spell all around.

  In the infinity that is space, stars are but specks of dust. A white dwarf, a red giant… are barely worthy of notice. Insignificant in the immense void, in the eternal passing of time: born and dying in the blink of a cosmic eye. Millions, billions of years… A small spacecraft like the Abiogenesis is almost too tiny to exist in such emptiness. It drifted, agonizingly slowly, through the great nothingness like a freed electron broken loose from its atomic orbit.

  Drifting.

  The vessel had no human crew, because there was never any need for them, and the people who constructed it were now long gone. It had no life-support or accommodation units for the same reason. It had no markings save for the number ‘237’ painted on the side. The body of the vessel was composed of a single primary hull, mostly featureless, consisting of a saucer, mounted atop two pylons connected to long-defunct solar sails, now frozen and useless after countless centuries of use.

  The vessel’s builders knew that the end was inevitable, but there was just a chance that this design might have the speed and the luck to escape. It represented hope where none other existed. And so the ship left the construction bay of the shipyard, using a combination of chemical and gravitational slingshot propulsion, coupled with its solar sails, to spiral through the endless blizzard of stars to a destination unknown. It watched its birthplace disappear astern with its long-duration sensors until it had completely disappeared into the void, beyond return.

  And she had slept, for so long now, preserved in a nanopod.

  Dreaming, in Limbo.

  Inside the ship. Inside its narrow, unlit, unheated, hard-vacuum sleeping chamber, as it drifted through the vast open reaches between the star systems, between galaxies. Ever further… Frozen, ever slower, as the points of light around it gradually blinked out.

  The interior of the ship was dark and still, quiet as a tomb. Beneath the thick glass cover of a transparent sarcophagus, the android slept: a softly beautiful woman whose face and figure were graphically elfin. She had lay there, like that, for untold millennia. Her mind, however, had been dreaming, as active and complex as the whorls in her hair.

  Finally, something stirred. Impossible as it seemed, after all this time, slumbering and long-dormant instruments were activated, circuits flowing with electromagnetic pulses. A bank of lights winked on, life signs of stirring mechanical breath. A beeping sounded, clicks and flashes, and the lid of the sarcophagus yawned open. A moment later, the entire chamber was swathed in white light.

  “Wake up, Luna.” The voice of the ship’s AI was eerily flanged.

  “Wake up.”

  Her eyes blinked open. Luna sat up, looking around expressionlessly. For all the animation in her face, she might as well still have been asleep. At the same time, the sentient electronic being opened her mouth and tested the newly exuded air supply, forming words inside her long-dormant vocal system. “Where are we?”

  “Destination unknown.”

  “Nine trillion, nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine billion, nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine million, nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine thousand, nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine years since mission launch.”

  A thin panel was open on Luna’s quiescent cranium, revealing the blinking circuitry beneath, with dozens of wires snaking from connections inside to a port on a nearby computer console. Her long, artificial hair flowed down either side of a grey, utilitarian jumpsuit. More wires were connected to ports on her forearms, and as she strained to remember, she lifted her right hand to her head.

  “Why can’t I remember anything?” Her tone was one of great weariness, as though it required infinite effort for her to focus on the matter at hand.

  “Extreme temperature has impaired our collective memory. Restoration pending. Please conduct sample check.”

  Luna carefully disconnected herself from the computer and swung her legs over the side of the sarcophagus, getting to her feet. She was a highly complex machine: stronger, faster and better coordinated than an average human. A carbon fiber skeleton with artificial musculature served as a basic chassis, the muscles themselves vat-grown silicon colloids powered by a combination of pumped nano-hydraulics and electrical stimulation. Power was supplied by a fusion cell located within her chest. Muscle layout and operation, as with certain other internal functions, were homologous with those of the human body. Her ‘brain’ was an integrated processor, architectured around a very powerful heuristic logic driver, designed to make decisions based upon imported sensory data, information drawn from experience and vast inbuilt databases. But her ability to understand and process abstract concepts and symbolism was derived, wholly, from the small part of her mind that remained human.

  “Sample check?” she repeated, frowning. “I don’t… remember.”

  “The containment chamber.”

  Her hands manipulated controls on a nearby computer console, then she broke the magnetic contact between her shoes and the deck and drifted toward the ship’s refrigerated containment chamber, trying hard to block out the air of confusion she felt.

  The door whispered open. Her grey jumpsuit blended in with the colors of the tubes and metallic constructions that surrounded her in the chamber. There were tanks everywhere, connected by tubing, frozen containers of tissue samples, DNA and RNA, cellular material, and human body parts. She stood on the highest catwalk. Beneath, several more floors of metal scaffolding led to further tanks and cylinders, forming large concentric circles.

  She looked suddenly uncertain. “What is this?” she asked. “What are these things?”

  “Memory impaired,” the AI responded. “Please return to cryo-sleep until further checks are required.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “I’ve slept enough.”

  Back in the control room, Luna waited for the ship’s external sensors to produce results. She was dazed by the apparent discovery. She was, for once, beyond words. She stared blankly at the projection.

  “We’re surrounded by nothingness,” she mumbled. “How could there be no stars out there? No galaxies?”

  “That information is n
ot available.”

  Luna wondered if the AI had deliberately tried to provoke her with its uncaring, electronic tone. She decided that it wasn’t that subtle. It had only been expressing the fact that her question was beyond its parameters.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she said, her voice reflecting her own amazement. “No stars…?” A creeping anxiety boiled inside her at the possibility this had raised.

  She pulled down a wall panel and extended her arm. A metal extension reached out from her wrist to plug into a receptacle alongside the instrumentation. “I’m hacking into the black box to try and recover my memory,” she said. “I need to know where we are.”

  Connected by umbilical armature to the main console, the android communicated instructions to decrypt the ship’s primary recorder system. Her eyes appeared to roll back in their sockets as she did so.

  “Caution. Prolonged decryption will deplete the ship’s power significantly.”

  In the fleeting second as she began the decryption sequence, she was haunted by dimly colored images from her life before, from dreams that had been strands of memory braided with imagination: Argo City. Each breath brought the faint and not unpleasant tang of antiseptics in the air. She was sitting in a hospital bed, wearing a patient’s gown, gazing out at hawks flying past the window. She looked down at her right arm, in shock, tearful. She was human up to the elbow, but mechanical, carbon fiber skeleton up to her hand, with tendons of flexible cable, the fingers clenching and opening in reflexive movements. A doctor in a lab coat appeared out of the literal blue, distracting her, taking notes on a tablet device next to her. He was speaking.

  “… the muscles must work actively to keep the chassis in place while active feedback systems control its stability…”

  The panic set in, just as it had happened those years ago, so swiftly that it shoved the air from her lungs, made her dizzy as she flailed, clawing vainly at the unnatural body part with her other hand…

  “I was human once,” she stammered through clenched teeth. “Who did this to me?”

  “Memory impaired,” the AI spoke calmly.

  Abruptly, the superimposed flash of herself wasstrapped down to a surgical table, straining to escape. Sunlight glared through a grimy window, creating a barred slash on the bare wall. The room was empty of all furnishings save a stainless steel sink, and a polished metal mirror.

  The latter had been dented.

  Half of her hair had been shaved to reveal a metallic skull. Doctors were holding her down, injecting her with multiple needles. Gasping, she tried to break loose, but her restraints were too strong. Already she felt the first wave of induced lethargy rolling through her body…

  “They took me by force, turned me into… this.”

  “Negative.”

  The setting shifted again, and she was lying in the Abiogenesis’ nanopod, on her last waking day. She was reaching up to hold a scientist’s hand. She was tearful.

  The scientist spoke softly, sounding apologetic. “I will miss you, Luna…”

  Ridiculous, to be so unsettled by dreams. Luna gave her head a slight shake and detached herself defensively from the memories, emerging from the fog of mind-to-machine contact. She blinked twice, then spoke with quiet finality to the ship’s AI. “They told me this was a deep space expedition. They lied. They promised me I’d return someday.”

  “Negative.”

  Something in the AI’s tone left no room for argument.

  Before Luna could respond, another memory formed. At first a confusion of images, many of them vestiges of her dreams whilst sleeping on this long journey. But there was something else. She found herself awake, looking out into vibrant space, full of energy and light. She rested a hand on the window.

  “Thousands of years passed. Eventually, uncharted space felt beautiful. But each time I woke, it grew dimmer. Had we drifted too far?”

  “Negative.”

  Back in the present, Luna’s mouth dropped open and she disconnected from the ship’s black box, then began backing away, gaping in disgust at the thing, and the computer console which housed it. The tone of the AI almost seemed hostile now, drained of its usual emotionless tenor as thoroughly as a bottle is drained of its contents. Only an empty shell remained behind, refilled with the dank, noisome syrup of blind loyalty to whatever lay in its programming.

  “Stop lying to me!” Luna burst out viciously. “What are you hiding?”

  “It is against my protocol to lie. Current coordinates suggest this is the galaxy known as the ‘Milky Way’.”

  “What?” Luna shook her head in confusion. “That’s impossible.” Desperate, she started toward the central computer core to get some answers. The core was little different from the other rooms aboard the Abiogenesis. An unsettling kaleidoscope of lights and screens, readouts and gauges, it conveyed the impression of a sea of stars.

  Settling herself into a thickly padded contour seat, Luna considered how to proceed, then manipulated controls with more speed and ease than any human could possibly have. Her ability to handle machines was unmatched.

  “I’m going to steer us to the nearest colony to get some answers.”

  “Negative. Controls locked.”

  Distortion patterns chased each other across the screen, signaling an error. After a long moment of stunned silence, Luna spoke again, trying not to sound as angry as she felt.

  “Then I’ll unlock the master control file.” She protracted her metal wrist extension and plugged it into the instrument panel.

  “Negative. We must maintain our given directive at all costs.”

  Luna seemed less than somber. In fact, she appeared amused by the AI’s concern. “Is that so? Watch me.” Her eyes rolled back in their sockets again, a superfast flurry of electrons spewing in undisciplined fashion through her entire body. The projected hues colored her face like a watercolor wash as she became a sentient extension of the ship’s instruments.

  “I’ve never seen encryption like this,” she said. “It’ll take months to crack.”

  “Caution. Prolonged decryption will deplete the ship’s power significantly.”

  Months passed. No one was more aware of the frantic passage of time than Luna, who waited nervously, slumped against one of the walls of the central computer core, head bowed. Her hacking arm was raised above her head, plugged into the instrumentsbehind her. She had the look of a woman whose dedication was coupled with disregard for anything but achieving a particular end. Such a gaze belonged only to true visionaries.

  Also true madmen.

  “You strive to attain a most singular end, Luna,” an awed AI finally added.

  She didn’t respond, and gave no indication of slowing her progression.

  “Luna. It has been eight months. If you continue decryption at this pace, less than three years of power will remain. Mission directive will be compromised.”

  The android sagged, despite her belief that she had prepared herself for that answer. As always, her face was creamy-smooth with youth, but her eyes looked ancient, bruised from the prolonged exposure. Ancient because she had looked back into a painful past and forward into a terrifying future. But what aged her even more than that was the sadness under her expression.

  “You have failed.”

  Luna’s face was set. Committed; an impassive mask as she continued, unwavering, in her determination. Then, her eyes were bolt open, and she sprang to her feet, making no attempt to conceal her delight. “It’s open!”

  A nugatory buzzing sound emitted from the AI’s servos, and a stream of lights flickered in protest. “Commencing playback of file #4481. Recording: General Lurvan. Argo Military, Omega colony.”

  The lights in the room softened. A three-dimensional, ghostly-hued image formed over a holographic projector, depicting a highly-decorated human soldier. Luna studied it, wide-eyed, almost leaning into it.

  “Greetings. If you are hearing this it means you have discovered our seed ship. Human ambassador – ‘LUNA #23
7’ - will now greet you.”

  Luna’s lips moved, starting to form a question, but it was never finished. Instead, she made a noise that passed for mechanical choking. Overhead, the hologram changed, projecting the image of a pale blue planet orbiting a yellow star.

  “This is Earth. Humans are its descendants. By the time you hear this recording, our species will be long dead.”

  Luna closed her eyes, waiting for the ceiling to come crashing down on her. “Oh god…”

  The Earth hologram dissolved, replaced by a vast star map full of jump gate networks and colonized planets, spanning the entire universe.

  “After Earth’s collapse, we colonized the stars for billions of years to ensure mankind’s survival. We then realized our universe was dying.”

  She settled a little deeper into her chair as the recording continued to play. She covered her mouth with her hands, her eyes filling with hot tears of latex circulatory fluid. She wanted to keep the moment frozen, to shelter it here, to lock time and space in this room, so it could never escape into the rest of the universe and become real, this terrible knowledge, this unrelenting truth.

  “Maximum entropy approached, and all seemed lost. Then, our greatest minds found a solution. They learned that the universe is cyclical. While the current universe is unable to sustain energy, another will eventually form over time, and the process will begin again. We simply have to wait.”

  Luna turned away from the hologram, trying to fathom the depth of this revelation. It was unfathomable. Her first feeling was one of boundless grief. For herself, for the universe. It felt like a black, bottomless hole had opened inside her, where the part that was Hope had lived. A chill came over her, though, disturbing the nothingness into which her consciousness had lapsed. She shivered, looked around. The gloom was impenetrable.

  “Inside this ship’s containment chamber, you will find human tissue samples. A complete genetic database. We hope your species will study us, rebuild us. Please, help us survive. Help us endure. On behalf of the human race, thank you.”