Echoterminus: Echogenesis Book 3, page 3
THE OTHER SAM
“Isn’t it a little small,” a woman said, “for a starship?”
The media training had clearly paid off, for rather than scowling, Martin Tenenbaum merely chuckled politely. Some of the technical and admin staff, who were under orders to be present during this investor’s meeting, chuckled along nervously from beside Sam.
The 1:1 scale model of the starship that sat on a plinth was, indeed, barely larger than a tennis ball. Sam felt a stab of sympathy for the woman still staring at it with a look of incredulity.
“The real question,” said Tenenbaum, smoothly turning the question on its head, “is how big does it need to be?”
Nicely done, thought Sam.
Outside the launch facility, long ranks of tropical palms swayed in a gust of wind. Just days before, a storm had come rolling in over what was left of the Everglades, bringing rising tides that threatened to overwhelm the flood defences put in place by NASA years before.
“Our work in the Starship Initiative,” Tenenbaum continued, now addressing the entire crowd, “has reaped enormous benefits for humanity through our development of new and better models of artificial intelligence and a new era of nanotechnology, without which none of this would be possible. It has also, thanks to the investments and faith placed in us by companies and business leaders such as yourselves, led to enormous leaps in medical as well as environmental science, which, as you all know, is more important than ever in these rapidly changing times.”
As he spoke, Tenenbaum made a point of raising his wrist so they could all see his bioMate bracelet. One of his many subsidiaries had developed the device to not only detect but also treat many of the novel diseases that had cropped up in line with the gradual inching upwards of global temperatures.
Lowering his wrist, Tenenbaum stepped toward the life-sized model of the starship and touched a finger to its mirror-surfaced skin.
“Of course,” he said, “it is a little small.”
A ripple of laughter worked its way around the room.
“But,” Tenenbaum continued, dropping his hand back down by his side, “this isn’t really the whole of the starship. The really big part, which we couldn’t possibly fit in here, is undoubtedly the light-sail.”
Tenenbaum gestured to one of his techs and a holographic image of the starship appeared below the room’s domed ceiling.
“Now that’s what it looks without its light-sail,” said Tenenbaum. “This, however, is what it looks like with it.”
The holographic starship shrank to a point before fading entirely from view. Seconds passed, and then more seconds—long enough, Sam could see, for some of the visitors to suspect something had gone wrong with Tenenbaum’s show-and-tell.
Then, a wall of white appeared, filling the curved ceiling. Thousands of filaments reached from this wall and toward the vanishing point where the starship had been. Within seconds, the wall became more and more curved before finally resolving into a single vast sail.
“Now, this sail,” Tenenbaum continued, addressing himself directly to the woman who had spoken up, “is definitely on the scale you mean. Once the ship leaves our orbital facility, the sail will unfold until it spans several miles, despite being thinner than a sheet of paper. Now, if it were towing a craft big enough to house flesh and blood astronauts, that sail would have to be bigger—magnitudes so: so big, that if you could find a stick tall enough to hold it up, you’d be able to put a tent over Florida and keep the whole state dry through the rainy season.”
With that, the projection vanished. “Too many people,” Tenenbaum continued, “even now, on the cusp of the 22nd Century, hold on to a 20th Century idea of interstellar space travel—one of rugged astronauts locked inside tin cans.”
He smirked and shook his head. “Here, we think differently. Travelling at greater than light speeds still isn’t possible—although recent discoveries suggest this may not always be the case. Our colonies on Titan and Mars will only ever be outposts, populated by scientists and the military. And while we remain fully committed to finding solutions to the problems we face here on Earth, we also believe in maximising our species’ opportunities for long-term survival. Which is why you’re all here today.”
Tenenbaum again touched a finger to the physical scale model on its plinth. “These craft contain not one single moving or mechanical part. They’re far more akin to organisms than machines. Each carries within it something in the region of fifty thousand yottabytes of data.”
“And that’s really enough to store the minds of everyone who’s going to be part of this future colony?” someone asked. Most likely, thought Sam, a member of Tenenbaum’s own PR team.
“It is,” Tenenbaum replied. “It’s an incomprehensibly vast amount of data, but that reflects the sheer density of information that makes up a human being. And this isn’t just some small select group of astronauts as in previous eras: Our future colonists number thirty thousand, give or take, each one rendered as a kind of living snapshot—all their memories, emotions, desires and thoughts—using technology developed by our very own cybernetic super-intelligences. And of course, many of you present here will be reborn as part of that future colony.”
Over the past several years, Sam had heard Tenenbaum deliver almost exactly the same speech to nearly identical audiences all across the world. It was always easy to tell which members of the audience were fanatical believers in the Initiative: they all had that same, starry-eyed look about them, as if they were busily imagining all the exotic worlds some future version of themselves would one day wake up to.
As he surveyed their eager faces, Sam spotted Amit Subarash, gazing at his lord and master with undiluted awe.
Without Subarash, there might never have been a Starship Initiative. Yet Subarash didn’t seem to care that Tenenbaum took the accolades, while he remained almost unknown to the outside world.
Soon enough, though, Tenenbaum would be dead. And with him gone, Sam, as a newly-installed member of the Board of Directors, would be in a prime position to help decide who took over running the Starship Initiative.
The best candidate was Amit Subarash himself: the man was even more brilliant than Tenenbaum, yet unburdened by the latter’s capacity for self-deceit and personal aggrandisement. Driven as Subarash was by a deeply moral sense of duty, he would make an excellent figurehead for the Initiative. For while Tenenbaum worked hard to project the same selfless image, in Subarash’s case, it was actually true.
Unfortunately, Subarash’s almost fanatical devotion to Tenenbaum made it highly unlikely he would ever accept the truth about the man he—
One side of Martin Tenenbaum’s head exploded, and his body slumped gracelessly to the floor.
In an instant, the facility was overwhelmed by chaos. The terrified screams of the audience filled the air as they all fled for the exits—all but Sam and a few others who had been close to Tenenbaum, plus Tenenbaum’s bodyguards. They dropped to their knees by his corpse, their guns drawn as they scanned their surroundings for the perpetrator.
Sam caught the glitter of silvery threads amid the ruin of Tenenbaum’s head while his bodyguards shouted into radios. Subarash remained unmoving, his mouth working soundlessly and his eyes full of horror. Then he looked at Sam with an accusing expression as if, somehow, he knew Sam had had a hand in acquiring the tiny, flea-sized drone that had just ended Martin’s life.
Half a dozen more security personnel burst in through the exit, their own guns drawn, followed by a crash cart and medical staff. Piper was among the former, talking rapidly into a handset while Seiko, her second in command, stared at the ruin of Tenenbaum’s body.
Just then, Piper glanced Sam’s way and gave him the tiniest of nods.
We did it, thought Sam, struggling to hide his elation. We finally killed the bastard.
“Nice try, Sam.”
The voice was thin and reedy—more a gasp than actual words—and instantly recognisable.
The dead man pushed himself up onto his elbows. With his one remaining eye, Martin Tenenbaum stared past the forest of legs surrounding him and directly at Sam.
Nobody else seemed to notice.
“I’ll see you when they wake me up in my new body,” said Tenenbaum. His mouth was still intact, and as he spoke, the dead man stood on unsteady legs. “You didn’t know I already had spares, did you?”
Stumbling backwards, Sam slipped on someone’s spilled drink and fell hard. The corpse pushed its way past the people surrounding it and kept moving toward him.
But that’s impossible, thought Sam: they were still months away from a full test of the technology that would one day allow them to upload minds to cloned bodies.
Unless…
“What did you think I was doing in Hawaii?” the dead man asked, leering down at him with a single, accusing eye. “I ran the final tests in secret. There were two of me for a few days, Sam: it was remarkable, like having a twin brother I’d never known existed. Of course, I had to euthanise him, but he served his purpose. I like to think he understood, even if he didn’t go willingly.”
“You’re dead,” Sam sputtered.
“Sam, Sam.” Tenenbaum shook his head. “No one needs to die anymore. In a few weeks, I’ll come back from the grave like Lazarus, and never have to go begging for funding again. They’ll crawl to me on their hands and knees and offer me everything for the hope of a second life. And then, Sam, you’ll see what real power is.”
The stink of blood and meat filled Sam’s nostrils and he gagged. Something was stuck in his throat. He reached up to—
“Easy, Captain.”
Sam gasped, the last threads of the dream still clinging to his conscious mind before slipping away forever. He opened his eyes to see the silhouette of a face haloed by bright light and looking down at him. Behind the face he glimpsed a metal wall or ceiling. The light felt oddly raw, as if his eyes were not used to seeing.
But all he could really think about was the awful sensation of suffocating from whatever was jammed between his teeth.
Then the face above him shifted, and he saw who it was.
Sun.
“Relax,” said Sun. “I’ve got it.”
Sam sensed that she had spoken to someone else. Her dark hair tumbled around her shoulders, and he realised he was lying on his back beneath ceiling lights that were painfully bright.
Whatever it was that had been lodged in his throat suddenly came loose. Surging upright, Sam sucked in a huge breath, then coughed explosively and repeatedly. He felt an arm go around his back, supporting him.
“Up you get,” said another voice—one Sam now recognised as Joshua’s. “Should we tell him now?”
Tell who what? Sam wondered. His eyelids felt sticky, and his mouth, too. Looking down and around himself, he saw he was naked and sitting inside a metal box not unlike a coffin and with a contoured interior. When he looked around, he saw that the floor, walls and ceiling were all made of metal, and all around him were other boxes, all of them identical to the one in which he—
Then his memories came back, bit by bit at first, then a great torrent of information: his years working for the Initiative, the upload technology that meant he’d one day be reborn under a new star, the cloning technology…
…and his betrayal of the man who made it all possible.
The rough texture of the breathing tube still clung to the inside of Sam’s throat. Had their plan worked? There were, after all, such an enormous number of variables that it was almost inevitable something would go wrong. And that wasn’t even taking into account the astronomically slim chances against the Tsiolkovsky locating a sufficiently Earth-like planet for adapted humans to live on.
But perhaps that was the old Sam Newman’s way of seeing things. That was the distinction he now had to make: the Sam whose memories he carried was long since dead and buried back on Earth.
He touched his chest, marvelling at the smooth, supple flesh. No, he was someone new. He had an entire lifetime before him.
“Not yet,” Sun said in reply to Joshua’s question. Her voice betrayed a touch of strain Sam did not miss. “Let him find his feet first.”
Sam took hold of the coffin’s metal lip with both hands and began to lever himself upright. Both Joshua and Sun moved to hold him steady as he rose. His bones felt like putty. Then Sun wrapped him in her arms, holding him for nearly a minute before letting him go.
“Don’t move too quickly,” Joshua advised, still holding on to one of Sam’s arms. “I did, and got myself a nasty bruise.”
“I’ll take it easy,” Sam croaked, shaking Joshua’s hand loose. He reached up and pressed the flat of a hand against the low metal ceiling to steady himself. “Where are we?”
“A world,” said Joshua. “Habitable for certain. It has flora and fauna and judging by the evidence so far, evolution here followed a broadly similar path to back home. I wouldn’t call it Earth-like, not exactly, but there’s air and running water. It’s more than we had any right to hope for or expect.”
Sun knelt by Sam’s empty coffin and lifted something out of a slot on its side. “Here,” she said, handing it to him.
Sam saw it was an advance mission jumpsuit identical to the ones both Joshua and Sun wore. He took it, letting Joshua hold onto his upper shoulder as he got dressed. Even this simple act left him feeling surprisingly winded.
“So I take it you’ve all been outside?” Sam asked them.
“All of us, yes,” Sun confirmed.
More fragments of memory kept sliding into place when Sam needed them: meeting Sun shortly after her divorce, when they had each thought themselves too old for romance; his lost years, as he had come to think of them, before he drifted into Martin Tenenbaum’s orbit in the late 2050s. The slow, dawning realisation that Tenenbaum was far from being the tech saviour his publicity team had worked hard to portray him as. Their attempted assassination of Tenenbaum, and his subsequent resurrection, weeks later, in an entirely new body cloned from his DNA and carrying his recently uploaded memories.
The uniform felt warm and soft against his skin. Glancing up, Sam caught Joshua’s eye—although this was a Joshua Fuchs he hardly recognised. The Fuchs Sam had known had been an old man even when they first met.
This Joshua, by contrast, was a startlingly young man with a long, lean face and bright, blue eyes sparkling with intelligence.
“Are you ready to take a look at the outside world?” Joshua asked.
Yes, Sam wanted to say. More than anything, he wanted to see this new world through eyes that were new; to touch it with his fingers, and taste its air.
But there were, he knew, things that first needed discussed. He had imagined a million different ways the conversation would go once he awoke, and none of them were pleasant.
Still. It had to be done.
“I heard you say there was something you wanted to tell me,” he asked Joshua. “What was it?”
Not that he couldn’t guess what it was.
Joshua exchanged a glance with Sun, then hesitated, seemingly lost for words.
“Half the crew are missing,” Sun said abruptly.
“Missing?” Sam repeated.
Sun gestured around the cramped bay. “You were the last scheduled to wake. I don’t know how to put this, but…Susan Wells isn’t here. Nor are Tomas Sancristan, Li Zhao, Bilal Yildiz, Otto Minsky, Morgan Yu or Sebastian Lewandowski. Instead, there’s…other people.” Her expression became more agitated. “Sam, I don’t know who they are.”
This is what you wanted, Sam reminded himself as he watched her. This is what you worked toward all these years.
It was going to be hard for them, he knew: hard for Joshua, Ethan, Irish and all the others he’d come to know back on Earth. They’d trained for a day such as this, even though they knew they themselves would never set a foot on another world. What they hadn’t trained for was betrayal by the man selected to be the commander of the advance mission.
It was going to be particularly hard for Sun, once she understood the depth of his betrayal.
“I know,” he said carefully.
Neither Sun nor Joshua said anything at first. They stared at him in stupefaction, as if they hadn’t heard him quite right.
“I don’t understand,” said Joshua. His concern, Sam could see, was slowly giving way to anger. “What do you mean ‘you know’?”
Sam took an experimental step across the bay toward the bay door and managed it without faltering. As he did so, he realised he was hungry—overwhelmingly so.
“You got a nutrient pack for me?” he asked.
“Here.” Joshua reached for a foil packet on a shelf and handed it to him. Sam tore it open, consuming its contents in seconds—pellets that contained a carefully balanced mix of essential nutrients, proteins and carbohydrates to fuel his new body. It tasted of blueberries and chemicals.
“The new people,” Sam said between mouthfuls of pellets. ”Have you spoken to them yet? Have any of them told you anything about why they’re here?”
Sun looked at him like he was a total stranger. “We asked,” she said, “but they wouldn’t talk unless you were awake.”
“I should mention,” said Joshua, “that Ethan was about ready to come in here and break your pod open with a hammer if you didn’t wake up and tell him what the hell’s going on.”
Crumpling the empty foil pack, Sam dropped it into a trash slot by the door. As he ate, his command implants had come online.
“Then I’d better get out there,” he said, reaching for the bay door control.
“I’m your wife,” said Sun, her voice trembling slightly, “How come you know who those people are, and I don’t?”
The door slid open, revealing a short corridor. “I’m sorry for keeping you all in the dark,” Sam told them both. “You especially, Sun. If you’re angry, I don’t blame you. But everything I’ve done, I’ve done for a reason.”
Everything he saw, heard and smelt the moment he stepped down the lower bay ramp proved so overwhelming Sam nearly lost his balance. He caught himself on one of the ramp’s struts, thinking it would be quite the entrance to fall flat on his face in front of them all.
