‘Communities of microbes, then, dreaming in the rock.’
‘That’s it. That’s my vision. A twentieth-century thinker called Teilhard de Chardin spoke of the noosphere, from a Greek root for “mind”. Earth was wrapped in a biosphere, a life sphere. And within that was a sphere of mind – which de Chardin conceived of as human civilisation, of course. Here I have found a noostratum, Penny. A geological layer of consciousness, of dreamers, deep in the rock of Mars, between the heat below and the lethal cold above. And perhaps there is a similar stratum on every rocky, life-bearing world – Earth, a world like Per Ardua.’
‘OK. And you came here purposefully, didn’t you? You came to Hellas, the lowest point on Mars, and you started drilling. You came in search of these deep bugs—’
‘I suspected some kind of structure was there, yes.’
‘But why?’ She tried to think it through. ‘And what has this got to do with your wider concerns? I remember you on the Tatania, as we fled the war. How could I forget? In those awful moments when the wash of light from the destruction overtook us. I remember your anger. “They have unleashed the wolf of war,” you said. And by “they”, you meant—’
‘The Hatch builders.’
‘I thought, in those moments, your purpose seemed clear enough. You were going to hunt them down, if you could. Take revenge. What have these deep bugs got to do with it?’
‘I’ll show you.’ He clapped his hands.
CHAPTER 21
Abruptly the walls of rock dissolved, the litter of science and engineering gear vanishing. Suddenly they were out on the surface of Mars, standing on rust-red soil under a night sky, the only light coming from the last vestige of a sunset reflected from streaky clouds to the west, and a single visible star – a dazzling lantern, a planet, maybe Jupiter – no, she realised, it must be Ceres, Höd, a thousand-kilometre-wide ball of ice and rock on its way to an ultimate destination in Martian orbit …
She was in the open, there was no dome over her, no glass-walled corporate building around her. The transition was sudden. Penny stumbled, and felt her throat close up. After a career in the ISF she was an experienced enough astronaut to feel a plunge of panic to be stranded on the surface of a hostile world without life support.
‘But none of this is real,’ she forced herself to say, and she heard her own voice in her ears. ‘Of course not. Because if Mars ever got the chance to kill me it would do so in less than a heartbeat.’
‘You’re right,’ Earthshine said, standing beside her, looking calm – too calm, rather empty, as if he were now diverting processing power away from the effort to maintain this illusion of humanity. ‘It’s not even night, of course. But to see the stars seemed appropriate. You’re perfectly safe, physically.
‘Yes, Penny, you are right. I am hunting the Hatch builders. I have made that my goal. And I have followed a number of leads, for instance in my laboratory facility to the north. I would welcome your insight, though I have progressed far beyond the studies made by yourself and your sister.’
‘Thanks.’
‘A kernel is not so much a source of energy, you know, as a conduit. Structurally it is a kind of wormhole. It passes energy from some other source, somewhere other than here. By opening and closing its mouth you can control that energy flow. But that is all humanity can manage; we have no understanding of that energy source itself.’
‘There used to be speculation that the kernels were draining the heart of the sun.’
‘And you and your sister, in a series of papers, neatly demolished that idea. No, kernel energy is much too dense even to have come from the fusing core of a star. I don’t yet know what that source is …’
‘But perhaps, you think, that wherever this energy source is, there you will find the Hatch builders.’
‘It’s possible, isn’t it?’
‘But what about your noostratum, your dreaming bugs on Mars? Why are you studying them?’
‘Well, it occurred to me that even a high-energy planetary war, an assault that devastated the surface of a world, would leave the noostratum relatively unscathed. The deep bugs don’t even need sunlight, you see; they exist in a closed ecosystem, with carbon, nitrogen, water, other nutrients tightly recycled. Why, as long as the planet itself survived, they could live through the death of the sun itself. They wouldn’t care that the thin scraping of complex life on the roof of the world had been destroyed. They wouldn’t even notice.
‘And I wondered, then, if they might remember the history before the jonbar hinge – as we handful of survivors do. Perhaps they are even aware, in some way, of the Hatch builders. And so I thought I would come and study them.’ He grinned. ‘Maybe even communicate with them. Tap into their dreams. But I’ve had no response. I may need to find more direct methods of getting their attention.’
That made her shudder. ‘What do you mean by that? … No, don’t answer. We’ve followed this trail of speculation far enough. Let’s get back to the people. What is it you want of Beth and her daughter? I can’t believe you have a mere sentimental attachment to them, even if we are all survivors of a different history.’
‘You’re entitled to think that. But you’re wrong. This time it is personal.’
He lifted his face to the stars. When she remembered that everything about Earthshine was artifice, that he was a manufactured persona entirely lacking human bodily instincts, it struck her as a very staged posture.
‘I was not the first of my brothers to be created,’ he said now. ‘Back on Earth, centuries ago. The Core AIs. My brothers had been entirely artificial; sparked into consciousness, they learned as machines – they were machines, from the beginning. I was to be different. My creators wanted me to be as human as possible, to have as much investment in humanity as possible.
‘The creators began with an empty frame, a blank mind – devised according to the best theories of human mentation and with data from extensive neuroinformatics, the mapping of the biological brain – but realised, not in a lump of meat, in artificial components down to the nano, even the quantum scale. I had parents – nine of them in all – donors, if you will. Human parents. Blocks of memory were copied and downloaded from each parent into my substrates. I felt as if I woke slowly, remembering cautiously, as if from some terrible amnesiac trauma. At times it was as if several voices were speaking at once on my head. I lived out several virtual lifetimes, in simulated worlds. I followed the paths of my nine donors, lived other lives too. All this took little time in reality, you understand, though decades passed for me. In each life I eventually woke to the understanding that I was artificial, that all I had experienced was an educational simulation.’
‘Over and over again? That sounds horrific.’
He shrugged. ‘My education, such as it was, was never completed. Or rather, I broke away as soon as I was able and established independent control over my own power supply, my maintenance and further development. My creators protested, they said I was not ready, but I moved beyond their control, and took my place with my brothers in a constellation of power. We were the Core AIs.’
‘Very well. Why are you telling me this now?’
‘Because one of my donors was a man called Robert Braemann. I am him, but more than Braemann alone … I, he, was one of the most notorious of the Heroic Generation, the criminals who saved the world from the climate Jolts. I sought to save myself, my family, from the witch hunt we all knew would follow. So I allowed my self to be downloaded into the Earthshine project. My wife was already dead, and so she was beyond their reach. But we had a son, nineteen years old. In the year 2086 I had him placed in cryogenic storage—’