Tor hop-skipped from chamber to chamber as Gavin followed sullenly. A pack of semisent robots accompanied like sniffing dogs. In each new chamber they snapped, clicked, and scanned. Tor accessed data in her helmet display and inner percept.
“Look! In that chamber drones report organic compounds that have no business here. Heavy oxidation, within a super-reduced asteroid!” She hurried to an area where drones were already setting up lights. “See these tracks? They were cut by flowing water!” Tor knelt. “They had a stream, feeding recycled water into a little pond! Dust sparkled as it slid through her touch-sensitive prosthetic fingers. I’ll wager this was topsoil. And look, stems! From plants, and grass, and trees.”
“Put here for aesthetic purposes,” Gavin proposed. “We class AAAs are predesigned to enjoy nature as much as you biologicals…”
“Oh, posh!” Tor laughed. “That’s only a stopgap measure, till we’re sure you’ll keep thinking of yourselves as human beings. Nobody expects to inflict nostalgia for New England autumns on people when we become starships! Anyway, a probe could fulfill that desire by focusing a telescope on the Earth!”
She stood up and spread her arms. “This habitat was meant for biological creatures! Real, living aliens!”
Gavin frowned, but said nothing.
“Here,” Tor pointed as they entered another chamber. “Here is where the biological creatures were made! Don’t these machines resemble those artificial wombs they’ve started using on Luna Base?”
Gavin shrugged. “Maybe they were specialized units,” he suggested, “intended to work with volatiles. Or perhaps the type of starprobe that built this facility needed some element from the surface of a planet like Earth, and created workers equipped to go get it.”
Tor laughed. “It’s an idea. That’d be a twist, hm? Machines making biological units to do what they could not? And of course there’s no reason it couldn’t happen that way. Still, I doubt it.”
“Why?”
She turned to face her partner. “Because almost anything available on Earth you can synthesize in space. Anyway…”
Gavin interrupted. “Explorers! The probes were sent to acquire knowledge. All right then. If they wanted to learn more about Earth, they would send units formatted to live on its surface!”
Tor nodded. “Better,” she admitted. “But it still doesn’t wash.”
She knelt in the faint gravity and sketched an outline in the dust. “Here is the habitat, near the center of the asteroid. Now why would the parent probe have placed it here, except that it offers the best protection?
“Meanwhile, the daughter probes the parent was constructing lay out there in the open, vulnerable to cosmic rays and whatever other dangers prowled.”
Tor motioned upward with her prosthetic right claw. “If the biologicals were built just to poke briefly into a corner of this solar system, our Earth, would the parent probe have given them better protection than it offered its own children?
“No,” Tor concluded. “These ‘biologicals’ weren’t just exploration subunits. They were colonists!”
Gavin stood impassively for a long time, staring silently down at one of the shattered airlock hatches. Finally, he turned away. Radio waves carried to her augmented ears a vibration that her partner did not have to make, since he lacked lungs or any need for air. Yet, the sound amply expressed how he felt.
Gavin sighed.
Imagine we’re still in our own Age of Innocence, way back a generation ago-within living memory-when the universe seemed bright with every possibility.
At the time, a notion floated around, that machines might someday fly across the stars. And-by copying themselves-those envoys could spread wisdom across the galaxy. Perhaps it happened already.
And it had, many times! A great dispersion whose ultimate outcome wasn’t wisdom, but devastation. Of course we knew nothing about that. Back then, in our naïveté, we pondered the silence! If alien machines lurked nearby, shouldn’t they have responded? Sure, we seem to have an explanation now. As I write this, I’m surrounded by wreckage from an ancient war. Mysterious adversaries wiped each other out, leaving none to tell the tale. But don’t you find such clean symmetry suspicious? Shouldn’t there have been survivors?
Even mutual annihilation generally leaves someone enduring amid the rubble! So let me propose a theory. One that many of you will find creepy. Worrisome.
That we’re not alone out here amid the rubble. There must have been survivors. And-sooner or later-we’re going to find them.
Which brings up the old question…
– Tor Povlov
70.
Oh, how lovely.
She derives our presence… we
Worse, she has started broadcasting her ruminations, as a journalistic report, sharing her unconventional thoughts with the Solar System.
Defying the prevailing assumption-that no broken remnants could endure across tens of millions of Earth years-she writes convincingly that there ought to be living machines out here. Fragment fugitives from the ancient fight, still active and “lurking” as she calls it.
So, logically, the next thing she will ask is obvious, even before her words spill forth.
Which brings up the old question… why haven’t these ancient voyagers spoken! Our Internets are so wide open, any klutz could find a way in. Surviving alien probes would see sites like “Invitation to ETI.” Why not answer?
A generation ago, scholars posted something more daring-a direct confrontation! And at this point in my broadcast, let’s replay verbatim their list of challenges (with my occasional commentary):
Lurker Challenge Number One
To any alien visitors who may prowl out there, spying on our world-by now it’s clear you’ve no intention of answering the many calls beckoning you to make contact. You’ve chosen silence. Is it worth our time to guess why?
The following list of reasons isn’t comprehensive-after all, you’re alien! It does represent an honest try. We ask and demand that you ponder whichever reason comes closest.
First, if you’ve spent years monitoring our radio, television-and now our Internet-and the reason you haven’t spoken-up is that you’re afraid of the rash or vicious behavior you see depicted in our media… please be reassured!
True, many of our movie and TV dramas portray distrust, selfishness, and violence. But you should know that, in fact, very few of us experience events as disturbing as you see in shows. Most of us dislike our old barbarous traits. By exploring these ancient feelings, inherited from a dark past, we hope to understand them better.
Also note: In a vast majority of these tales, the “loser” tends to be whichever person or group was more aggressive or intolerant at the start. And we are especially hard and critical on our own institutions, portraying or criticising their failings. Doesn’t that say something about our moral heading?
The same holds for nonfiction. Despite news reports depicting a riotous world, the actual per capita rate of mayhem in human society has declined dramatically for generations. Look it up! More than three-quarters of all living humans never personally witnessed war, starvation, or major civil unrest. An unprecedented fraction are allowed to improve their lot in peace. Many ancient bigotries and cruelties have lessened, or at least been put in bad repute. And with spreading education, far greater advances seem possible.