Edge of the Wire, page 11
“But what will happen when we connect to the black box?” Rowe asked.
Cortez looked at him.
“Well, obviously, you’ll see a recording of what happened,” she told him. “You’ll see that I’m telling the truth. But if it’s in there—if whatever came at us through the Goo is in there, in the recording, and you connect to it?—then it might happen all over again. Those men out there who still have enviro-suits on? They could kill each other. Or—I dunno—maybe something worse. Lately, I have been wondering if perhaps this is like a virus that has lain dormant on Tendus-13 for many years, but it comes alive when Goo touches it.”
Rowe thought for a moment about Davidson and what’d he’d seen, the shadowy figure in the recording from his suit.
“Speaking of viruses, the ESA is operating under the assumption that there’s an airborne virus on this planet and it infected your crew—and that that’s what caused them to kill each other—with the women attacking first,” Rowe said, as if speaking it out loud would make it somehow make sense.
“And it may well be a virus,” Cortez replied. “Just not in the way they told you. We humans were not the ones who were infected. This thing, this virus . . . it infects the Goo.”
Rowe shook his head as if to clear it, despite the aching wound.
“If that’s the case, then why did you have to bring me here?” Rowe asked. “You could have just walked up and told me all this. I would’ve listened.”
“I had to make sure you weren’t already somehow infected,” she replied. “I had to get you out of that enviro-suit. But also . . . There’s one thing more. Something which might be a part of all this, but which I still can’t explain. I can’t tell you; I have to show you.”
“What?” said Rowe. “Show me what?”
“Just follow me,” she told him. “It’s not far.”
Cortez made her way out of the cave and started walking across the horrid flashing landscape of Tendus-13. Rowe followed. He considered, several times, simply running away—or attempting to subdue her—but always did not see an immediate advantage to this. Despite her assurances that they were close to the ship, Rowe was still disoriented as to his precise position relative to the Marie Curie. The last thing he needed was to be stranded somewhere without his enviro-suit.
“I just found this one day,” Cortez told him as they marched along. “I was out having a walk. Exploring and exercising. Trying not to go mad as I waited for the next ESA ship—which I thought, you know, could mean waiting years instead of weeks. But then I found this thing I’m going to show you, and it told me something completely new.”
“It told you?” Rowe asked, surreptitiously searching the distant horizon for anything that looked like a silhouette of Waverly.
“It told me that I don’t yet understand everything that’s happening here. Be patient a little more, and you’ll see as well.”
They walked into the gray horizon through the blowing dust and silt. After a few minutes, a rocky mesa came into view. It was like so many others on Tendus, but tall enough that its upper portions brightened visibly with each flash of lightning. And if you squinted just right, it might look a little like an irregularly illuminated beacon, Rowe decided.
An attractor.
“I see why you went to explore that,” Rowe said.
“Just wait,” said Cortez. She kept her eyes on the rocky outcropping and did not look away. For the umpteenth time, Rowe considered whether or not he should simply flee.
They reached the base of the mesa. It took longer than Rowe had expected. Tall things always looked deceptively close when you were on foot.
“We have to go all the way to the top,” said Cortez.
The mesa was over one hundred feet high. Rowe found the ascent challenging. Making progress up the side incline felt like walking on sand or jogging on a beach. Rowe breathed hard and strained under the effort and wished he had not been hit in the head.
“Not far now; not far at all,” Cortez whispered as her own breaths became ragged with effort. The wind whipped up around them, and the lightning seemed to grow brighter as they ascended.
When they reached the caprock, Rowe saw that the top of the thing was like a floor—eerily flat and perfect. But that was not what held his attention. In the center of the “floor” was a circle of large stones, perhaps twenty in total, demarcating a space some thirty feet across.
“Did you do that?” Rowe asked.
Cortez shook her head.
“I found it that way.”
Cortez approached the circle.
“You can walk down inside,” Cortez said. “You sink, but it’s safe. Watch.”
Rowe did not know what “walk down” meant, but looked on as Cortez carefully approached the circled stones. She stepped across the circle’s boundary and immediately began to sink gently into the ground. The sinking was slow, but definite. She did not seem alarmed.
As Rowe watched in surprise, Cortez sank until she was nearly waist deep. Then the phenomenon seemed to stop, and she stood half-in half-out.
“Keep watching,” she commanded.
A mist of bright white began to appear above the circle of stones, just over Cortez’s head. For a moment, Rowe thought it was a product of the lightning flashes—radiant glare from the concentration of fiery bolts above. But this new mist had its own incandescence. A strange glow like warm candlelight gradually settled all around her.
It was beautiful.
“What is this?” Rowe asked.
“I think that—somehow—it is Goo,” Cortez replied.
“Goo?” Rowe asked. “What are you talking about? How could it be . . .”
But Rowe trailed off because a shape had begun to appear within the shimmering light. Its general form slowly solidified into a familiar outline, and then Rowe heard what sounded like muffled speech.
“Boy-o . . .” it attempted to say.
CHAPTER NINE
ROWE STARED FOR A VERY LONG TIME AT THE FLOATING SPECTER OF Noyes—rendered in full human size—in the glowing air above Cortez.
“Noyes?” he called softly, approaching the circle.
“It would seem so, boy-o,” the avatar said cautiously.
Noyes looked down and examined his own body, then looked back up at Rowe and shrugged.
Now it was Rowe’s turn. He patted himself like a man looking for his wallet. He ran his hands through his hair. He turned the pockets of his flight suit inside out. Then he looked back at Cortez.
“What is this?” he asked her sharply. “What is going on here? Is this real?”
“I told you,” she said. “I think it’s Goo.”
“But I’m not connected to anything,” Rowe stammered. “I’m not in an enviro-suit. I’m not wearing anything the Goo could use to identify me. I don’t have any bio-implants. Hell, I’ve never even had a surgery.”
Cortez smiled sarcastically to indicate he was finally grasping the point. (Her expression said that some people took awhile, but better late than never.)
Rowe looked back at the apparition.
“Is that really you, Noyes?”
“I think it is,” Noyes said. “That is to say, I think I’m me.”
“You think . . . or you know?” pressed Rowe.
“This is all a bit confusing,” Noyes responded. “I mean, how could I not be me? That’s impossible. So I guess I am me? I must be.”
“Stop talking nonsense,” Rowe commanded.
“Sorry,” Noyes replied in the tone of the genuinely bewildered.
“You’re floating on top of a butte on Tendus-13,” Rowe said. “We know that for sure. But this is the last place I expected to see you.”
“Believe me, it’s the last place I expected to be,” said Noyes.
“You really don’t know how you got here?” Rowe asked. “Or how you’re being projected right now?”
Noyes shook his head no.
Rowe turned back to Cortez. She was relaxing in the sandy pool. The posture made Rowe think of someone enjoying a hot tub.
“Nice AI,” she told him.
“This is Davis Foster Noyes, an ETC bot designed to deal with the dying. I got him because of my deep-brain aneurysms.”
“I think he could be handsome in the right light,” said Cortez.
Noyes bowed to acknowledge this kindness.
“How far does the Goo extend from this place?” Rowe asked Cortez. “If I want Noyes to follow me back to the cave, can he?”
“No,” she answered. “I think it only lasts a few feet from this clearing.”
“But you can talk to it?” Rowe wondered. “Ask it questions? Ask it: ‘What’s the square root of 1,294?’ ”
“Goo,” Cortez said, “What’s the square root of 1,294?”
The digits 35.9722114972 appeared above Noyes’s head in glowing green, then gradually faded into nothingness.
“I prefer silent, green text,” said Cortez. “The Goo here recognizes me as well, and remembers this preference.”
“But how can the Goo be here?” Rowe said. “Did you guys do this?”
“Of course not,” snapped Cortez. “We were too busy killing each other. Nobody on our team ever made it out this far.”
“But what other explanation is there?” Rowe asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to understand,” said Cortez, lifting herself back up out of the quicksand until she seemed to sit on a ledge—her feet dangling into it. As she changed positions, Noyes’s resolution appeared to weaken ever so slightly.
“We have an engineer named Glazer,” Rowe said. “His team found something underneath the surface of the planet that’s like tubes. Could that be a natural feature that conducts the Goo, or maybe allows it to live underground, inside the planet? And then a hilltop like this could be an access port where it comes out?”
Even as he spoke, something else occurred to Rowe.
“You said the Goo on this planet made you kill each other. Made you appear as aggressive monsters. But Noyes isn’t telling me to kill people.”
Noyes’s eyes went wide, as though the very idea was scandalous.
“No,” said Cortez. “It seemed to work through our enviro-suits. But you can see your AI without your suit here. And I agree, he seems peaceful enough.”
Rowe did not know what to think. He said: “Maybe this is a pool of ‘clean’ Goo up here—like an oasis in a desert—that’s not infected yet.”
Cortez smiled coyly.
Rowe walked closer to her.
“Why do I suddenly feel like there’s still something more?” Rowe said cautiously. “There’s something you’re still not telling me?”
Now the playful smile dropped from Cortez’s face. To increase the resolution of the Goo, she eased back down into the silt.
“What can you tell me about Walchirk-V-16?” she asked.
“Walchirk-V . . .” Rowe trailed off as he tried to remember. “Why do I know that name?”
“Goo, take it away,” Cortez said.
Directly adjacent to Noyes, an image of a black-red ball pocked with angry meteorite craters appeared in very high resolution and began to slowly rotate.
Above the ball, incandescent green text started to form. Cortez used the glowing text like teleprompter talking points.
“Walchirk-V-16 is one of only ten X-Class planets discovered in all of human history,” she said. “It is the only one of the ten to be found during our lifetimes. The X-Class designation is controversial, of course. Many Silkworms hold that if something is X-Class, then it’s not a planet. It’s an ‘anomaly.’ And, of course, anomalies don’t need to get wired by Silkworms.”
Rowe nodded, looking at the rotating black and red orb.
“This is taking me back to my Academy days,” he said. “X-Class are the planets that we’re waiting to wire . . . if, as you say, they are planets at all. And we use the word ‘waiting’ because officially Silkworms will always wire every planet in the universe. That’s part of our sacred charge. Our prime directive. So if something’s not wired then it’s either not a planet, or it’s a planet we’ll return to when we develop whatever technology is needed to do the job.”
Cortez nodded.
“Most X-Class planets are fatal to human and machine alike,” she said. “Walchirk-V-16 is no exception. However, it’s the only X-Class where the mechanism that kills people is still a total mystery. Other X-Class planets . . . we know what the problem is; we just haven’t solved for it yet. Like, we don’t have a sword strong enough to kill that dragon—or whatever analogy you want to use—but one day we will, and then we’ll come back and slay the dragon and wire the planet. But on Walchirk-V-16, there’s no dragon. There’s nothing. You just die.”
“Yes, I’m remembering more now,” Rowe said in a flat, dead tone. “No one can live on Walchirk for more than a few seconds, and it’s unclear why. Step onto the planet, and you immediately pass away. And in the bodies we can get close enough to recover, there’s no clear cause of death when they do the autopsy. Supposedly, one day there’ll be enough information that the Goo will be able to figure it out, but for the time being, that planet’s surface is like the touch of the Grim Reaper itself.”
“Do you understand why I am bringing this up?” Cortez asked.
“No,” Rowe said. “I mean . . . maybe something on this planet got into the Goo and caused your crew to kill each other, but this certainly isn’t an X-Class planet. If you land, you’re not immediately dead. In the grand scheme of things, we’ve only just got here. I’m sure we’ll be able to identify the problem and fix it eventually. We always do.”
“Yeah, I’m not so sure about that,” Cortez said. “I think this place is X-Class, and the ESA just hasn’t figured that out yet. I think that whatever’s here needs to be left alone.”
“Why?” Rowe said, growing desperate at the intransigence of Cortez. “Look, we can rescue you and take you home now. You know that, right? Our own version of the Goo is working fine . . . Noyes over there is fine. It’s . . .”
But even as the words came out of his mouth, Rowe again recalled the loss of Davidson impaled in the loading bay.
“Whatever lives here—exists here—has only encountered the finite, self-contained version of the Goo that we bring down to planets with us,” Cortez countered. “But the moment it connects to the real Goo up above that lightning—the Goo that is beamed all across the universe and is joined with every planet that’s been wired—then I don’t know what happens. What if it got into that Goo? This malfunction, this virus, whatever-you-want-to-call-it . . . Imagine what happened here—to my crew—happening all across the universe, all at once, wherever people use the Goo.”
“But . . . the Goo is impervious to bugs and viruses,” said Rowe. “When one appears, the Goo destroys it. This has always been the case. Maybe a first-time anomaly in a contained environment like Tendus-13 could confuse the local Goo for a short time. But the big, interstellar Goo? The one you’re talking about? It’s literally not possible. What you’re suggesting is unthinkable.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m wrong,” Cortez said. “How do you know the Goo instantly kills every bug? Because the Goo told you that?”
Rowe thought for a second.
“The lady’s got a point, boy-o.”
Rowe looked over at Noyes.
“I’ve never heard the Goo criticize the Goo before,” Rowe said.
“These are strange times,” Noyes replied. “It is technically accurate to say that there is no outside arbiter for many things the Goo asserts. Just because something has been correct every time in the past does not guarantee it’ll be correct in the future.”
“Thank you, freshman-year-philosophy-bot,” Rowe said derisively.
“I’m here to serve,” Noyes said with a little bow.
Rowe looked back at Cortez.
“Fine,” he said. “There could theoretically be some danger in this situation. We’re both Silkworms. We chose this job because it’s dangerous. We’re people who take risks. But we have to do something.”
“Risking ourselves is one thing,” Cortez told him. “Risking the Goo is something else entirely.”
“Then what do you want me to do?” Rowe asked her, clenching his fists in frustration.
“I thought I was being clear, but apparently you need me to come right out and say it,” Cortez told him. “Tendus-13 needs to be declared an X-Class planet. We need to help the ESA make that determination. We—you and I—need to make sure Tendus-13 becomes a place that the ESA abandons any hope of ever wiring. With any luck, they’ll nuke it from space.”
“How—”
“We have to kill everyone who comes here,” Cortez said. “We have to kill every member of your landing party. Then we have to do what I did to the Marie Curie. We have to destroy their equipment. Disable your lander. Smash every enviro-suit port until nothing can interface with them ever again. It’s the only way to keep the interstellar Goo safe from whatever is here. The ships up there in orbit . . . They can’t see inside the cloud cover—and thank the Goo they can’t—but eventually they’ll have to notice that whenever you send humans down to the surface of Tendus-13, they . . . Don’t. Come. Back. Even the densest mission commander will eventually stop sending Silkworms to die for no reason. It’s bad for your ARK Score, not to mention future work promotions.”
Cortez lifted herself up out of the sand and rose to her full height. Noyes began to fade a bit. Cortez positioned herself directly in front of Rowe.
“We’ve got to do this,” she said to him. “I’ve had quite a bit of time to think about the dilemma we’re in, and it’s the only way to be sure. We have to kill everyone; disable everything. If more Silkworms come after your group, we have to kill them too.”
Rowe took a step back from her.
