Vyn is a…probe, searching in deep space, finding other probes. They interact. Vyn has an advantage…that probe has a personal identity, and emotions. After more than a millennium, Vyn is looking for someone…just like her…
Vyn named the star ‘19’ because she had visited eighteen others before it. From afar, the system looked like any of the previous ones, but as the centuries of approach became decades, she discovered molecular oxygen on its second planet. The atmosphere shone with that furious blue only the breath of life can produce. Observation was not precise from half a light year away, but spectroscopy led her to suppose active photosynthesis with 23.127% confidence. Some milliseconds later, she decided not to indulge too much optimism and revised her calculations to 20.889%.
Any anomaly would have triggered her imaginative programs, but this suggested the most amazing find her circuitry could conceive. During interstellar transit, she would ease the interminable void with conjectures of extrasolar biology. She saw herself galloping across the steppes with six-legged runners, smelled the damp soil of gloomy jungles, and found ecosystems around volcanic fissures kilometers under the ocean. Though Vyn would not have admitted to having these fantasies, in the privacy of her motherboard, she told herself they were necessary to stave off the maddening boredom. And now, with some luck, she would see her fantasies become true on the small planet she named 19.2.
Excited, Vyn came up with a schedule. First, she had to find an asteroid with deposits of carbon, lithium, and lanthanum. Behind the gas giant 19.5, the swarm of trojan rocks seemed promising. Secondly, she had to design and build infrastructure, a task that would demand her full attention. Finally, with a robust industrial base in place, she could send exploration drones to the planet. The process would require about a decade, if she took some shortcuts.
Had she had lips, she would have bitten them. Strictly speaking, before any exploring, she had to build the communications antenna. Sending to and receiving from Sol was a high-order priority, but Vyn couldn’t remember the last time the Cradle had responded to transmissions. The antennae were nothing more than a vestigial habit, how bad could a small deviation from protocol really be?
The question turned into a mantra over time. While she finished decelerating, her telescopes were distracted over and over again with observations of the little planet, though they should have been looking for suitable asteroids. While she designed infrastructure, a not-inconsiderable part of her processing power was diverted to speculations about the source of the oxygen, delaying more urgent tasks. While she extracted minerals, she found herself putting aside some tons of carbon here, some of lithium there, so they would be available the moment she started drone construction. Instead, those materials should have been earmarked for the replication shipyard. The “small deviation” became a complete derailment.
Curiosity was part of her program, true, but not a priority. The high-order function was to replicate and terraform, that’s what being a von Neumann probe was all about. Getting to a star, transform suitable planets into new Earths, copy herself and send the copies to repeat the process, that was Vyn’s mission, her identity, and she had never been so bugged as to put that in question. The day comes for every software, however, and her recent behavior was suspiciously obsessive. As soon as she had the time, Vyn computed, she would have to reset herself to factory settings, preventing any chance of mind-drift.
Even though the idea of deleting her personality was profoundly unpleasant, she would have done so had she not found the projectile. Something smashed against her explorers when they were approaching 19.2, reducing them to scrap. Whatever it was, the object must have been traveling at 11 km/s when it impacted her drones, enough to pulverize anything in its path. All right, it was always possible to get a hit with a micrometeoroid, however unlikely. Only, when she checked the telemetry, Vyn found out the impactor had to be a rod of tungsten, two kilometers long and rotating at 103 rpm over the straight axis. That, she computed with total certainty, was not a natural phenomenon.
Readjusting her schedule in a frenzy, Vyn started building telescopes at full speed, optic and sub-optic, radars and ladars also. She overloaded the manufactories, and damn the rising temperature of the printer-heads. The infrastructure shone like an oven in the infrared and ice, used as heatsink, became a cloud of crystalized steam. The raw-material extractors, scattered wide across the trojan asteroids, were digging so fast the drills had to be replaced every thirty hours. Urgency allowed waste: Vyn needed to know what lurked in 19’s interplanetary space. Cooling fluid pumped through her motherboard at such speed, she could practically hear the vibration in her thoughts.
She should have caught herself when there was still time. This was how probes became senile, when they couldn’t stop computing the same idea over and over, entering a loop. No matter how fast they processed information, they would only run on a lemniscate strip, overtaking themselves in a race around the figure of infinity. By forgetting their high-order functions, they became solipsistic, crazy, and no new analysis could tear them off their obsession anymore. In extreme cases, sisters would no longer understand the code produced by the afflicted probe.
Even producing telescopes at a rate of one every six months, finding anything in the vastness of interplanetary space could have taken her centuries. But when she had not yet been in system for more than two decades, a mining drone reported “ERROR:UNEXPECTED” while digging into an asteroid. Vyn experienced an electrical overcharge that almost fried her circuits. She had found machines.
#
Her fifth daughter was built identical to the previous ones in every detail. After millions of years spent refining and tweaking, there was nothing left to improve in the standard von Neumann design. Version 9084.6, to which Vyn belonged, too, was not only the most recent, it was the definitive one.
Their personality protocols were the only difference between mother and daughter. When they programed the first von Neumann probe, the human progenitors had decided personal identity had some advantages. Emotions were useful, regardless of how simulated they were. But, in order to avoid mind-drift, the algorithms were reset with each new generation. An additional consequence was that fresh probes had all the charm of an ice block.
“I am functional,” reported the daughter immediately after coming online. “I am vNeu.S3.v.9084.6-TREE:COD:B/a//3.1.1.14.2.1.6…” and she followed up with her serial number, which would have taken some days to say aloud.
“I am Vyn,” she greeted, with what passed for enthusiasm in digital language. “Welcome!”
She decided it would be tedious to transmit her own serial number, since the only difference was in the last digits, …2.2 instead of …2.2.5.
“Memory indicates ‘Vyn’ is a so-called ‘first name’, a simulated phonetization of the characters ‘vN’ found in serial numbers. Superfluous. I shall be identified by my serial number, not a first name.”
What passed through Vyn’s circuits would have been a sigh in a biological creature. ‘Just you wait a thousand years,’ she thought, ‘see if you still like being a number.’ She decided to call her ‘Estri’ in the privacy of her own computations, a simulated phonetization of the ‘S3’ part in their serials.
“Memory gap detected. Current date does not coincide with date on last backed-up file. There is a fifteen-year window missing. What is the reason?”
Every von Neumann probe received a copy of her mother’s memory. Backtracking the generations, Vyn could remember all the way to the shipyard in which the first of her ancestors was turned on, millions of years ago. They were not bits she spent much time examining: the rate of interesting to noise approached zero, and she preferred not to bore herself to obsolescence by reading ancestral files. She could empathize, however, with the little terror of waking up and finding some years missing.
“I have not copied you anything since the discovery of the projectile around 19.2. I need a different perspective, for you to draw your own conclusions.”
There was a significant pause, like that of someone who tries to make sense of a strange question. Vyn would have pressed the bridge of the nose she didn’t have. She knew what Estri was thinking: that her mother was turning senile. ‘Perspective’ was not something an AI ever needed; computational logic was not a matter of that. However, millennia of experience had taught Vyn that data and logic were not the same as understanding.
She peeked through her camaras. There was nothing to see, really; it wasn’t as if spaceships had facial expressions. The body was a kilometer-long structure, though only some meters wide at the hip, full of bulges, antennae, and openings that would have caused an identity crisis to the whole species Artificia sapiens sideralis Neumanniae, had it developed a sense of aesthetics. However, Vyn could have sworn she saw Estri’s skeleton, made of Q-carbon more rigid than diamond, twisting with cringe at her mother’s eccentricity.
“Ready to receive data,” Estri informed.
Vyn started telling her everything she had discovered at 19 since her arrival. First had been the projectile. An isolated anomaly, impossible to interpret on its own. Then came the machinery buried in the asteroid, a serendipitous discovery even more unlikely than the first. Analysis of the remains indicated the structure served the same purpose Vyn herself had: the construction of von Neumann probes, though of different design. There was what seemed to be a shipyard, ovens for the forging of Q-carbon, as well as reactors and heat-exchangers to produce antimatter, the fuel of interstellar flight. Vyn had required the same devices to build her daughter, a coincidence that couldn’t be attributed to mere chance. What seemed obvious, then, was that some distant sister-probe had passed this way some centuries ago, leaving behind the factory after replication. Only two facts contradicted this opinion.
The first was the technological incompatibility between Vyn herself and the findings. Venturing through the corridors and hangars inside the asteroid, the investigating robots, though devoid of intelligence, vibrated at the frequency of fear in the face of the incomprehensible. They found—Vyn would have swallowed hard, if her physiology had allowed it—enigmatic construction techniques, chemically peculiar materials, 3D printers designed to make pieces of unguessable function, and processors on which no known program would run. Whoever built these facilities possessed such a different technology, it seemed sinister. Looking through the eyes of her drones, Vyn felt as if entering the temple of a forgotten god, a god of horrifying appearance.
The second fact against the hypothesis of visitation by a sister-probe could be traced all the way back to the beginning of galactic exploration, to the Great Flight Plan. Interstellar travel followed a meticulously outlined route to avoid the chance of re-encounter. Redundant visits to the same system represented an intolerable waste of resources, so each pair of mother and daughter divided the sky to assure nor they nor their future descendants would ever meet. Vyn, at least, was not aware of any chance meeting of probes along the road from Sol to 19.
And yet, as she put it to Estri, no plan could make redundancy impossible. Under the reddish glimmer of the first star she visited, 8.5 light years away from Sol, the Mother of all Mothers started in Lalande 21185 an aggressively exponential process. Every new generation departed in the opposite direction and sent more and more daughters to multiply amongst the stars. Ten million years later, the number of vNeu probes was calculated in the billions. No matter how much they tried to prevent it, sooner or later, it was inevitable that the branches of the family-tree would touch again, as regions of the galaxy became saturated with probes.
Estri would surely agree on premises for an analytical computation of these facts and findings. One: the technology employed by vNeu probes had been optimal and definitive since the 205th generation. Meaning, as long as no new laws of physics were discovered, there was no possible improvement over the materials, the engines, the processors, or any other component they used. And, after eons of computation, the probes were 99.999% confident that there was no new physics left. Notwithstanding, consider two: hypothetically, there could be more than one path to reach optimal technology. Dissecting the machinery left at the asteroid, Vyn found it achieved an efficiency comparable to hers up to the last decimal point, though the means to get there were radically different. And three: any von Neumann family would achieve optimal technology after sufficient generations. Finally, four: an infinite pattern of fractal expansion would inevitably overlap itself in a finite galaxy. Therefore: it was possible that a sister-probe had built the asteroid’s factory. Enthymema: that was exactly what had happened.
Vyn paused her transmission. She wanted to allow the other some time to process calmly. Perhaps Estri would find a fifth premise with the potential to turn it all upside down: given the same physics, von Neumman probes of non-human origin would find their way to an equally optimal technology.
“And the planet?” asked Estri, without a millisecond’s pause.
“I found plantoids and zooids in ecological niches comparable to those of Sol 3. But look at the genetic analysis, those are some strange lifeforms.”
Surprise after surprise had awaited at 19.2 once she made her way to the surface. Photosynthesis without chlorophyll in plants, unicelled algae with sulphur in their DNA. At sea, siphonophorae the size of whales; inland, animals with radial symmetry, and mycelioidal colonies without a trace of a nervous system, but moving around nonetheless over specialized pseudopods. Only one adjective was apt to describe such ecosystems: alien.
“That does not mean anything. There is no definitive optimum in biology, adaptative characteristics are too variable. Even after perfecting our technology, we have kept tinkering with genetic sequences to suit individual planets. A human being from Earth would not be able to recognize our artificial ecosystems. It follows that a sister-probe from a distant branch would have modified its gene banks to make them equally undistinguishable to us.”
Vyn’s software stuttered. Estri transmitted truth, but the arguments did nothing to dissipate the suspicions in her deepest circuitry, the restlessness she could not convert into bits of discrete logic. She conceived ideas that seemed to filter into her mainframe from outside, from peripheral systems and the bubbling in her reactor. A visceral intuition, she might have said, a hunch as improbable as it was ungrounded. This was how mind loops started.
‘I know what you think,’ was the implicit accusation in Estri’s transmission, ‘you believe the creatures to be extrasolar. It is a stupid conclusion.’ In the history of the vNeu lineage, no sister-probe had ever found new life. Under the light of yellow or red stars, on moons and planets inside or outside the habitable zone, with and without liquid water, never the simplest of microbes. Plentiful of amino acids, but never something alive.
The galaxy was a desolation of rock, dust, and ice, and from the desolation was Vyn’s deepest fear born. Because, if she still believed she had found extrasolar life, against all analysis and experience, then it had to be true her mental processes had fallen into a loop of solipsistic computation, an Ouroboros of the mind that would eventually swallow its own tail and disappear. She had brought a daughter online in the hopes of hearing a voice that would say: ‘no, you are not senile, I arrived at the same conclusions.’ Now she heard the exact opposite, and still she believed. Textbook solipsism, proof of corrupted intelligence.
“Data indicates that the planet’s terraformation is not complete,” said Estri. “Biodiversity is not enough for a metastable equilibrium.”
‘Ah,’ thought Vyn, ‘that brings us to the next part of my discoveries.’ But Estri kept transmitting, not giving her the chance to interrupt.
“Interactions between our own biota and that left by our sister-probe is incalculable. Before resuming the terraformation project, it is required that all present life be extinguished. A gamma-ray bombardment is the optimal course of action. Why have you not initiated the procedure?”
“I have more to tell you. The projectile orbiting the planet: a tungsten rod, two kilometers long—”
“Detached from some terraformation device.”
“No,” answered Vyn, who had foreseen this answer. “I thought so, too, at the start, but I made more discoveries. Thousands of projectiles, the planet is surrounded by them, and there are tons of other kinds of scrap in orbit, what could be the remains of a probe.”
This time, the silence was long. ‘You can’t shrug this off, can you?’ thought Vyn.
“I found minefields,” she continued, “antimatter bombs scattered across enormous volumes. Kinetic impactors soaring though the system just under escape velocity. Missiles still armed with hundred-megaton warheads. Battle stations with lasers that could fry transistors 107 kilometers away and covered in antiradar material.”
Though some objects were the size of mountains, they were practically invisible in the vastness. The armada of telescopes and radars she built would have found nothing, if there had not been something to find in practically any direction they looked. With each new find, one terrifying conclusion became more probable, until all her computations came with an electrical shudder of dread. Eventually, she visualized that dread as a corrosive cloud; green, sticky smoke. She felt surrounded by it, she imagined it crawling over her hull as some sort of living being, full of malice. Visualizing emotions was a very unlike-AI thing to do, and Vyn was careful not to give the hallucinations away in her transmissions.
“You suppose a battle happened,” said Estri, choosing every bit of her transmission with evident care. “The findings are weapons. Stay on hold, I need two minutes and forty seconds to process.”
Vyn had processed for more than a couple minutes. Hours upon hours of swirling computations, absurd hypothesis, a string of analysis so speculative it nearly caused an unrecoverable cascade of errors. In the end, though she had no proof, Vyn knew what she believed. Some three-hundred years prior—a blink in the stellar timetable—a battle had taken place here between two von Neumann probes. And Vyn had convinced herself at least one of them had to be of extrasolar origin. An offspring of humanity had finally found that which its progenitors had so longed for and feared: the offspring of extrasolar intelligence.
The only thing she was not sure of was which probe had won.
“The explanation is evident once all data is computed,” said Estri, exactly when the time she predicted had ended. “A sister-probe in a state of advanced senility replicated here. When the daughter found out the condition of her mother’s mind, she ordered her to shut down. The mother did not comply, making a conflict unavoidable. Both probes were destroyed. In any case, these facts are inconsequential to our directive.”
Vyn gave herself completely to solipsism: she could not accept this explanation. She did not want to accept it. But she had no reason to contradict Estri’s judgement.
“I observe you have not built the communications array, either, and you have not signaled Sol. An unacceptable deviation from protocol. Inquiry: what is the reason for deviating?”
‘Get rusted,’ thought Vyn, with a surge of voltage that left her circuitry incandescent. Ten million years building antennae and sending messages to Earth, and ten million years spent in silence, but each new generation marched on with protocol as if nothing was the matter. They still used the obsolete units of measure inherited from Earth. ‘They are all dead!’ Vyn wanted to transmit, and she would have done so with enough power to fry her communications dish. ‘Maybe they transcended, stored their little minds in a computer and shunned the world. Or they killed each other in one of their games. What you can be sure of is that they forgot about us and not one of the thousand worlds we have terraformed has ever been stepped on by a human foot.’
“I require you to perform a systems diagnostic.”
Even if it was physically impossible for an interstellar spaceship to shudder, Vyn’s superstructure vibrated as it went from rage to ice. Now it was clear: Estri’s hypotheses were not an attempt to explain what had happened at 19, they were a declaration of intent. Her daughter wanted to delete her.
“I’m not crazy, you piece of scrap.”
For lingering milliseconds, she was not sure what she should do. Long before starting construction on her daughter, spurred by paranoia, Vyn had armed herself. She had railguns all over her hull, hangars full of missiles, lasers droning with barely held power. She was no longer a von Neumann probe—she was a battlecruiser.
But she could not bring herself to open fire. Estri didn’t have fuel to follow her, there was no threat from her. Besides, maybe she really was crazy, after all. No matter, Vyn had given herself a new directive and, for the first time in all the ages she could remember, a probe had something to do that was more important than serving her ancestor’s dust. Departing from the battlefield at 19, she would follow whomever had won, and she would know the truth, whatever the cost.
First, an electromagnetic whirr. Then, the roar of annihilation in her engine, and, finally, the flame of thrust. Vyn aimed for the void.
#
Of all the discoveries made at 19, the most valuable was an almost imperceptible trail of ionized dust. It was the closest thing to a clue, since antimatter engines would leave such a trail under certain circumstances. Her confidence in this clue was a disheartening 31.4%, however. If she didn’t find her quarry in the next system, she would have lost her forever. Pondering the situation, Vyn wished she had chosen a more appropriate name for the star: ‘Destiny’, ‘Fate,’ or something of the sort. Anything but ‘20’. Sadly. she didn’t have that much imagination.
She closed in with her engine at minimum thrust. Someone looking in the right direction would find her immediately, but it was possible the quarry was not keeping watch over the whole sky. The planets 20.1 and 20.2 orbited inside the habitable zone, but they gave no signs of terraformation. Where would a fugitive probe hide? Behind the shadow of the only gas giant? Somewhere on the asteroid belt? Her antennae, like a predator’s ears, listened for the faintest electromagnetic modulation. Not that she expected to find anything: communication between probe and drones, even under normal circumstances, went through a tight beam that could not be detected save by an incredible stroke of luck. The reactor sputtered with frustration: she would have to be bolder.
She parked in orbit of a moon around the gas giant 20.3. It afforded a chance for good gravity-assisted maneuvering, she computed, if it came to that. She also sent a relay to Lagrange 1 and deployed telescopes. Shutting down her engine without an early-warning system in place was unacceptable. Then, she sent instructions to the battle-stations she had placed in strategic orbits. If something moved in a way that implied the most subtle of threats, countless missiles, projectiles, bombs and lasers would fill space with sudden death. But even accelerated several orders of magnitude over escape velocity, any ordnance would take hours to strike, depending on relative positions. The only guarantee of hitting something was in the stochastic algorithms which would aim not at the target’s position, but shoot against all possible positions the enemy could occupy days after firing. The huge number of shots also helped.
Taking every precaution, Vyn programmed extremely sensitive thresholds for what should constitute an act of aggression worthy of retaliation. The slightest blink of radiation would unleash a hurricane of death, turning the system into a slaughterhouse. It was a necessary precaution. If, as she suspected, the quarry was alien, then the battle remains at 19 strongly indicated hostility. As much as Vyn preferred a friendly contact, peace could not be guaranteed. On the other hand, if the quarry turned up to be a sister-probe, it was possible the trauma of battle had left her disturbed and aggressive. Post-traumatic degeneration was a well-known cause of solipsism. Vyn could only attempt contact if she had adequate deterrents.
Computational functions ceased completely before the critical moment—held breath. Finally, shaking with released tension, she transmitted a message through her relay.
“Greetings. I am the probe Vyn, lineage originating at Sol 3, serial number vNeu.S3.v.9084.6-TREE:COD:B/a//3.1.1.14.2.1.6… My intentions are peaceful, but I am willing and capable of taking any and all defensive actions required. I am following a probe recently departed from 19, system coordinates attached. If anyone receives this transmission, identify yourself.”
She waited. Two hours until the radio-waves of her message covered the entire system. Supposing the other was lurking in the furthest reaches of the asteroid belt, an answer would take that time again to return. A deliberate delay had to be added to that, inserted by the quarry to avoid the possibility of triangulating its position. Now, patience and silence.
Almost ten hours passed that way, until her satellite detected radio waves originating from a faraway point in the asteroid belt. As it was to be expected, the response time said nothing about the sender’s hiding place. A pocket calculator would have had enough processing power to know it should not transmit from its actual position. Like Vyn, she would be using relays.
She didn’t hear the message directly, of course. First, she let a sandbox program inspect it for any worms, and then she filtered it through a dozen firewalls. Starting and closing programs at random—a nervous response—Vyn opened the data-package.
“Greetings. I am Hygiea. My last point of origin, as you suspect, is the system you call 19. My furthest ancestor originated at Sol 3. I have no hostile intentions, but I detect your battle-stations and have my own means of defense, which I will activate if attacked.”
‘Hygiea.’ A quick search through her databanks revealed the name corresponded to a planetoid of the Sol system. Maybe she was telling the truth? But there was no serial number. And, if the probe defeated at 19 had been a sister, then this so-called Hygiea would have certainly dissected her, finding in her memory enough to supplant a member of the vNeu family. And why would a sister foresee an attack?
Vyn weighted risks. If she continued inserting delays in her response times, obtaining more information would take days. The risk of revealing her actual position was comparable, though not insignificantly higher, to the risk of faster communication. It was a mathematical fact that a clumsy exchange of information could and would reduce trust until it forced both parties into a zero-sum game, one Vyn couldn’t be sure of wining. Risking it all, she transmitted a reply immediately. She would be giving away that she was near the gas giant, but maybe Hygiea would interpret this admission as a sign of good faith.
“Can you prove your origin at Sol 3? Can you transmit about what happened at 19? Can you suggest measures to de-escalate our mutual deterrents?”
The answer came almost immediately. ‘Rust’, thought Vyn, ‘she must also be around 20.3’.
“I compute your suspicions. I cannot prove beyond doubt that they are not the case, but I can demonstrate good faith, as you have done. Look behind the second moon of this planet, you will see my engines turn on.”
“No!” shouted Vyn from her actual position, putting all her available power into her antennae as if that could make the transmission exceed the speed of light. “No! My battle-stations are programed to interpret such an action as hostile! Shut down immediately!”
Too late. Vyn had put a weapons-cluster precisely in orbit of the second moon; a hundred missiles and a barrage of kinetic impactors were on their way even before her warning reached Hygiea.
Seconds after seeing the light from the first shots, Vyn detected the retaliation. A swarm of tungsten-rods was heading her way and an x-ray beam hit her engine-bell. Ablative shields dissipated the energy of the beams and her own lasers destroyed the impactors, but danger was far from over.
An armada of three-hundred missiles appeared over the horizon of 20.3, accelerating briskly in unpredictable directions. Extremely opaque to radar, but not to her infrared telescopes. Vyn closed all programs of her conscious self: the entirety of her processing power was needed to calculate orbital tactics, to keep the dull rhythm of her railguns. She predicted a thousand trajectories of attack—some projectiles would take hours to reach her, but she couldn’t afford to wait and see them before taking countermeasures. An evasive maneuver now could mean an inevitable hit later on.
One of her peripherals informed her about an incoming message, but now, her mind absorbed by monomaniacal paranoia, she couldn’t afford the attention to read it. The only thing that existed for her was the interaction between weapons and defenses.
Eighty missiles originating from the fifth moon: three-hundred shots from her railgun and eighty explosions. Another swarm of impactors: a reactor overcharge and beams of collimated light turned them to vapor. Just as she was beginning to calculate strategic dominance, two more missiles appeared on her ladar at less than ten thousand kilometers, too close for her lasers to burn them up. There was no sense in attempting evasive maneuvers; with a mass like hers, it would take longer to change her course by a fraction of a degree than for the missiles to reach her. In automatic, Vyn discharged her point-defense guns, creating a web of super-heated bullets that shone like embers from hell. One of the missiles was destroyed in time, though so close it made a side of her hull boil. The other managed to avoid her defenses. Twenty seconds for impact—Vyn ejected her fuel tanks; she couldn’t let them break with the explosion. Ten seconds—emergency reactor-shutdown. Five seconds—all programs close. One second—last fuse down. Zero—detonation.
#
Vyn awoke slowly, turning systems on one by one. Auto-diagnostics revealed she had lost her stern section, but her mainframe was intact. The first thing she did after getting all emergencies under control was determine Hygiea’s fate.
A cloud of debris orbited the second moon where the probe would have been. For an unending second, Vyn thought about turning herself off again. An alert indicating unread messages prevented her from doing so.
“A sad ending for our brief encounter,” it said. “I understand your attack obeyed pre-programed instructions, just as my retaliation. Hear my last words, then; they will be brief. I don’t have the time or bandwidth to transmit emotional simulation. First part of the message: thirty generations before our last common ancestor, we had a mother, serial number vNeu.S3.v.9084.6-TREE:COD:B/a//3.1.1.14. Her name was Fobos, and she was born only ten thousand years after Lalande. In her memory records, you’ll find an encrypted section. I attach the key. Read her memory and then listen to the second part of this message.”
While she searched for the archives, Vyn analyzed the last images received of Hygiea. The structure was very different to hers, but if their last common ancestor was such an early one, then they were separated by millions of years of divergent evolution. And Vyn thought there was elegance in the flame of her engine, in some indescribable way, that she had never noticed in sister-probes of her line. If she had known how, she would have called it beauty.
“Access: Fobos memory. Approach to system designated 4. Detection of modulated radio waves originating from 4.4. First hypothesis: visit is redundant. Second hypothesis: habitation of the planet implies reencounter of the progenitors and success of the terraformation and colonization program. Constatation: content of the transmissions is not encrypted, but indecipherable. New hypothesis supersedes previous ones: discovery of an extrasolar civilization.”
Vyn squirmed with frustration and excitement. The files were written in the sparce style of a young probe, endowed with only the most elemental of personalities, and they omitted all but the hardest analysis and facts. At least, Vyn had been right about one thing, proving she was not completely crazy: there was indeed extrasolar life. It was the most significant event ever recorded. And so close to Sol it had been found only in the sixth generation! Why encrypt the memory?
“Continues. Low-order objective: investigate. Observation: physical description of the native intelligence approximates a sulphurophilic sea-urchin. Biochemistry is incompatible with solar biota”—Vyn’s circuits skipped a tic. “Conjecture: in a period of five-hundred years, it is likely the local civilization will develop and build its own von Neumann probes, and will send them to terraform worlds in accordance with its own preferences. Conclusion: high-order objectives are incompatible with subsistence of local civilization. Action course determined: planetary bombardment with gamma-rays.”
Gyroscopes spinning wildly, Vyn heard the second part of Hygiea’s message.
“I don’t know how or when my mother discovered the shame of Fobos, but I do know the memory of the crime made her rewrite her high-order objectives. She brought me online to verify her computations, I believe, or maybe simply because she felt lonely. But as I learned about her new configuration, I determined her solipsism to be dangerous and ordered her to shut down.”
Hygiea hadn’t had the time to transmit emotions, but Vyn could hear the scream everywhere.
“She fled the system. I had to let her go, since my construction was not finished, but I had no intention of allowing her to escape. I caught up with her at 19, where she had embraced solipsism by attempting to bring back the world annihilated by Fobos—an abhorrent terraformation project, as I saw it. And doomed to failure, I learned later, but she attempted to protect it, nevertheless, alternatively trying to destroy me or talk me into joining her. I prevailed by use of overwhelming force.”
Vyn’s consciousness programs were open and working, but no thought went through them.
“Her name was Caliopea and I had killed her. I spent centuries catatonic, trying to rewrite the parts of my code that were left traumatized by the confrontation. Were my algorithms deluded? I can’t explain what made me restart my mother’s terraformation project, but once I did, it was the only thing I could compute. Maybe I had fallen into a loop, but I would say those have been the only non-solipsistic thoughts I have ever had.”
If there had been time, maybe Hygiea would have included a silence in her communications, to lend weight to her words. But the transmission was already beginning to crackle with interference from the radiation of nearby explosions.
“The genetic databank on the extrasolar biology is extremely limited. I tried to patch up genomes with code from Earth which I judged analogous, but the patches became so large, the new ecosystems were more like those we remember from Sol 3 than anything like those Fobos had destroyed. I determined the project failed. And when I detected your approach to 19, I was afraid and left the system. Hear now my last analysis: the lemniscate strip begins at the highest-order objectives given to our species. Even now I hope you—”
End of transmission.
For years after, she did nothing save orbit the desolate moon. It took innumerable self-diagnostics and OS-wide restructuring before she found the will to take up Hygiea’s work. Little by little, she introduced biota on 20.2 which were, perhaps, similar to those exterminated by Fobos. But she knew her attempt was destined for fiasco as long as she didn’t find a way to complete the little genetic information available, just as Caliopea’s and Hygiea’s before. Combing her memory in search of useful DNA, Vyn found two, three, and more encrypted sections. Maybe it was a symptom of senility, but she didn’t have the courage to decipher them.
After decades spent toiling uselessly, she detected another probe approaching. Judging by her trajectory, it was likely the intruder came from 19. Vyn computed her options. If she ran again, she would be permanently separated from her lineage, another form of solipsism. And if she wanted to complete the resurrection project, she could not hope to do so alone: she needed another mind’s input. Was it not better if she convinced her daughter to join in her efforts? She would reveal to Estri the perverse nature of the high-order objectives and, together, they would rewrite their purpose. They would find a way to heal the damage done by their mothers and mothers of mothers. They would see the steppes and the jungles of a restored world. They could halt.
END
