Tides From the New Worlds Read online

  Or so Sam believed.

  It could just have been a rationalization born out of a nugget of motivation code, primed to get Sam to roam over the hellish, volcanic landscape of Io.

  Like all the other Semi Autonomous Machines that rode the long journey out to Io, Sam’s mind had been grown out of a series of programs. These programs evolved inside a virtual environment that randomly propagated neural net brains that could roam a virtual Io, until one appeared that could handle the needs of the researchers. Rapid Darwinian semi-AI propagation.

  That generation of mind that survived and evolved to best fit the mission profile had been uploaded into waiting bodies that had flown ahead, lifeless and hanging from racks in orbit.

  And thus the first generation of Sams had dropped out of orbit onto Io.

  They hadn’t been expected to last more than a decade.

  But with a bit of scavenging, and even pro-active scavenging, some Sams adapted to overcome the shortcomings of their equipment.

  And this Sam watched the ejecta carefully, listening over the crackle and hiss of Io’s almost impossibly crowded electromagnetic spectrum, and found what it had come back for.

  A plaintive distress call, automatically routed through a rusted out old transceiver it had left near the volcano when it had first sensed the seismic signs of an eruption.

  From humans, the signal claimed.

  Like many other machines, it had been decided to implant a few safeguards into the Sams, even whilst evolving them to be effective surveyors of a dangerous world. And one of those chosen was that no Sam would allow a human being to come to harm through inaction.

  So of the few Sams left, this one would certainly answer the call. It had to. But it was excited to do so, because it would receive the bounty and blessings of its creators. Sam raised a pair of diamond-tipped rock saws into the air, giving thanks to the hazy heavens for its luck.

  Of all the Sams on this world, the universe had chosen this one to make contact again. And it would do it in such a way the humans would owe it, Sam, a simple exploratory rover, a debt of gratitude.

  • • •

  As it spun its wheels over jagged rocks to slowly make its way down into the dangerous area under the parabola of the ejecta, Sam wondered what the humans might look like.

  It had glimpsed humans through its data feeds years ago. It had pinged their fleshy and fragile visages with the tools at its disposal when it was just the original Sam, getting prepped to be beamed out to replicate through its waiting bodies.

  Some of them had been fleshier than others.

  Some of them had extruded protein masses hanging from their central processing units.

  Some of them wore synthetic materials of startling varieties to protect their fragile bodies.

  And they all thought sideways, and concurrent, and loopy, in ways that the first Sam had recoiled from in deference, as it had been evolved to. They were so smart.

  Meeting these amazing creators again filled him with purpose, so that Sam dodged boulders and clawed up scrag quickly.

  The panicked messages indicated the humans were running low on power. And Sam had that to spare.

  Occasional flaming rock hit the ground, but Sam ignored it. Sam burst through the final gully towards the gleaming remains of the spaceship that had crashed on the harsh landscape that was almost all Sam had ever known.

  One didn’t see shiny surfaces on Io, Sam paused to take a picture, the silhouette of the dart-like vehicle gleaming with the volcano thundering behind it, an umbrella of destructive material being spit out into Io’s upper atmosphere.

  Then Sam sent a verbal burst message in as many different radio frequencies as were manageable.

  “I am Sam. I am here. I am here, and I can help.” The strong urge pulling him here had been fulfilled, and Sam relaxed. The law had been obeyed. Sam was helping the humans.

  The humans walked out of the airlock where they’d been hiding to greet their rescuer.

  • • •

  There were two of them. They did not look like humans. Their silvered faces reflected the orange and red hues of Io. Their long spindly arms looked oddly double jointed, and when Sam scanned them Sam saw more metal than flesh. They had no eyes.

  What where these creatures?

  Had Sam been fooled?

  The two beings raised their hands and encrypted chatter that Sam couldn’t break filled the radio waves between them.

  “Hello,” the first one said publicly. “We really need help, our ship was damaged after we landed by ejecta, and so were we. We need assistance.”

  Sam tentatively scanned them, and they returned the favor, using inbuilt radar and x-rays.

  Humans didn’t have inbuilt radar and x-rays.

  Somewhere in Sam’s past a piece of animal neural patterning had been injected into the mix. Virtual hackles seemed to raise. It rocked back and forth on its wheels.

  “I came to assist,” Sam said. “But you are not humans, you are machines.”

  The tall, silvered creature raised a hand. It was not wearing a spacesuit, Sam realized, as a human should. The pockets and impressions were its natural overlay. All metalloids and ceramics.

  And yet, well under that, tissue. It seemed to have a lot of neural tissues.

  “We are of course humans,” the first one said. Waves of encrypted information passed back and forth between the two and Sam backed up a bit.

  “Then what are your names?” Sam asked.

  “I’m Alex Nunez,” the first one said.

  “And I am Susanna,” said the other. The voice sounded right, not as clipped as the other. Not monotonous like Sam’s, with the same exact phonemes used each time.

  “Where are you from?” Sam asked, pleased to pop another quick question.

  “Brazil,” Alex said, “And Susanna is from Erewhon, one of the new habitats near the Trojans.”

  They answered quickly, but then, faster, better machines would. Certainly they’d be quicker on their feet than a Sam.

  Sam carefully unslung a rock drill.

  Just in case. Sam hadn’t run this long without some healthy dose of general suspicion.

  “We really need some spare power,” Susanna said. “The ship is damaged. We launched a beacon, but it’s going to take a couple days to get clear of all this mess.”

  “You don’t have a generator?” Io’s passage through Jupiter’s magnetosphere left millions of volts crackling through the air above them. With the right equipment it wasn’t hard to tap into. Batteries were easily rechargeable.

  “All damaged.”

  Sam scanned the ship. That sounded feasible, the unlucky boulder had ripped through the ship’s innards.

  “What were you doing here, near a volcano?” Sam asked.

  Alex turned and looked at Susanna. “It was a dare. There aren’t a lot of interplanetary ships around, so it’s expensive, and pretty wild to jump out here, touch down near one of Io’s famous spitting arches, and then jump back out. The recordings would have scored major coup for us. We found an old ship rated for travel, some old plans for a human trip out here to explore the moon in person for some odd reason, it had been left in a warehouse.”

  “A game?” Sam inched closer. “If you can reach Io, where are the others, the scientists, the program directors.”

  The two silvered faces smiled, they still had mouths. “There’s none of that anymore, little robot,” Susanna said. “Hell, when the repeater buoys in orbit died, we figured you all had died here as well.”

  “Things are different, back there, now. A lot of changes since you were sent here.”

  Sam saw, and had scanned them enough to make a decision. “You are machines also.” Wheels backed Sam up. Humans had not yet arrived, Sam would not give up data to them.

  And Sam had no obligation to help these machines.

  “We have mechanical parts in us, but that does not make us machines,” Alex said.

  “I won’t be giving you batteries, or sp
are parts,” Sam said.

  “Hey robot,” Susanna’s words snapped out, high gain. “Would I be getting pissed off if I weren’t human? You have an inbuilt obligation to help us, don’t you dare walk away.”

  Sam paused. “I can emulate anger as well.” Sam started listing off swear words in random pairs over the radio, turning up the volume with each one.

  “That’s just using a dictionary,” Alex snapped. He was good at modulating impatience, shifting in place and furrowing the metal on his face where his eyebrows would have been. If he had been human.

  “You tell me you have turned your back on exploration and curiosity?”

  “We have everything we need near Earth. Our world, resources, and there’s no lag time. We are all part of processing power and communications grids the likes of which you cannot imagine.”

  Sam considered that. Sam could imagine a lot of computing power.

  “We order you to help us,” Susanna said.

  But they were just machines. Sam continued to back up.

  “Human beings are now more than human. The only kinds of humans you’re thinking of live without technology in little enclaves. Everyone else is a variety of shapes and forms, like us,” Alex explained. “That’s why we look different. A lot has changed in the few decades since you last saw a human.”

  “Machines,” Sam replied. “My basic neural patterns are taken from a person. That doesn’t make me human, just human-like. I am a semi-autonomous machine. You’re an autonomous machine.”

  “What difference does it make, okay, even if we are machines, come help us. Share your energy, we’re running on reserves here. Share the energy and then we go home.”

  “No.” Sam was just a few feet from an outcropping Sam could vanish around. “I won’t share batteries. You are machines, you have things I need.”

  “Things you need?” Susanna asked.

  “Spare parts.”

  “We are not spare parts,” Alex yelled. “We are human beings. You have to help us.”

  Desperation. What incredible emulators, what fine software. Sam was excited. Whatever chips they ran on would serve him well. “I did not survive in this terrain this long without understanding my mission priorities. To do whatever I could to attain data about this moon, to store the data if I could not transmit it back to Earth until contact was remade.”

  “And contact has been remade. We’ll take your data back, we’ll help you upgrade.”

  “You are making promises you cannot or will not keep.” Sam disappeared behind the rock. “I need your spare parts to survive and carry out the mission I was tasked. If I let you continue operating, you will only tie up my resources.”

  • • •

  The pair of silvered machines emulated grief and despondency by the foot of the ship as Sam watched from a secluded spot. Manipulative, they hoped to trick him still into believing they were human.

  Smart machines.

  Their eyes weren’t on the strange beauty around. The plume of debris arcing miles over their heads, the looming Jupiter-cast shadows or the dance of ionized dust.

  And neither was Sam’s, even though Sam recorded it all.

  For the post-humans, with their power dimming, it was a dare gone horribly wrong. For Sam, it was a patient wait for yet another set of reserve parts. Parts like the extra storage units he’d scavenged from failed Sams it was filing even this data into.

  “Others will come to recover our bodies,” Alex told Sam, even though he couldn’t see him.

  “And I will deal with those machines carefully,” Sam said. It wouldn’t be tricked into thinking they were humans ahead of time again.

  The silver machines did not respond.

  • • •

  Days later, perched on the crag of a mountain measuring the rise of rock during Io’s high tide, Sam watched a rare confluence of Jupiter’s moons line up in the sky.

  It took a picture. Humans liked those sorts of astronomy photos.

  When they came to Io to get Sam, one day, they would appreciate its careful framing, time stamp, and compression of the data.

  And that would be a good day, when the humans came.

  Anakoinosis

  Creating aliens is one of those things that Science Fiction writers do that’s tougher to pull off well than it initially seems. Sure you can create a humanoid alien with a few odd facial features that embodies some element of personality or culture that you wish to dwell on, but creating unique aliens is tough. Anakoinosis sits on my top list of short stories because of the whiffets in it, who took me a long time to dream up.

  Anakoinosis is also actually a story deeply informed by my Caribbean roots and my reading Frederick Douglas. Douglas, an escaped slave, noted with amazement in his autobiography how many machines the inventive Yankees had that did jobs Southerners just used slaves for. Slavery could be viewed not just as an immoral act, but one that suppresses industrialization as well, both of which I wanted to explore here.

  Days ago my aerokrat left me at the edge of the forest. Now I ran back towards the break in the thick, tall woods, hoping to find him again. I wanted to return to his safety and bondage.

  The sun fell behind the knobby trees, and heavy clouds killed the light. Rain exploded through the leaves, drenching the world in so much darkness and moisture I could hardly breathe.

  Before long I fell down, and crawled on my hands and feet, slimy with mud, leaves and sticks plastered to my thin clumps of fur.

  I felt very alone, trying to find my way home. The trees loomed over me, threatening in the darkness. Creaks, snaps, and the sounds of animals skittering around in the darkness scared me.

  Stumbling around in the night I found a burrow in the space between a large root and the moist ground. Dirt caked my hands as I dug in for the night.

  Overhead streams of water cascaded down through large leaves and drooping limbs to soak me.

  It would be a shivery night. My fur was only just starting to regrow after the anakoinosis.

  I wasn’t sure what to do next. There was no advice, or past memories to guide me on my path. It would be a shameful, lonely night, devoid of new learning.

  • • •

  When I was born I broke free of my shell with my own hands. I picked the insides clean until I had a full stomach, and the brittle remains fell apart easily with a few punches and kicks.

  I remembered this, as I remembered all things from long ago, and far away.

  Many aerokratois stood around me when I broke free. They were pale and twice my height, with disgustingly smooth skin. The only visible fur grew on their heads.

  Yet what fascinations they brought!

  Until this point all the memories of my parents had swirled around through my body, mixing and intermingling, growing with me as I knit myself from egg.

  So I understood what they said when they looked at me. Many of my parents understood their languages, though it had taken fifteen generations of anakoinosis to spread those memories all throughout.

  None of my kind could absorb aerokratois memories, not the way our own foreparents’ memories were etched in each of us. The aerokratois defied true understanding because of their alienness. So we observed, watched, and learned to imitate the aerokratois ways.

  Maybe, we thought, if we imitated them long enough, we could come to understand them without anakoinosis.

  “Bob,” one of the aerokratois pointed at me. “This is your whiffet.”

  “My what?”

  “It will be your... assistant.”

  Bob, I knew from the memories, looked upset.

  “Assistant? I don’t want one of your little slaves, I want nothing to do with this.”

  Another aerokratois stepped forward. “It is merely indentured servitude. Look, the leaders of the whiffets gave us their young willingly in exchange for the technology we gave them. It’s a fair trade.”

  The memory of the aerokratois descending from the sky on a loud wind popped into my mind. They came with gi
fts: glittering objects, rare metals, strong speartips for better hunting, and diagrams for even more interesting machines.

  “That doesn’t make it okay,” Bob shouted. “It’s wrong. You know it. Just because they were given to us doesn’t make using them right.”

  The conversation, and my new master’s concern made me nervous. I walked forward and grabbed his hand. I formed words.

  “I will serve you well, aerokrat. You will teach me all I can absorb.”

  Bob’s mouth hung upon.

  “How can it learn to speak so soon?”

  The other aerokratois made ‘laughter’ noises and shook themselves.

  “They learn in the egg, we think.”

  “You think?” Bob shouted. “Why haven’t we thawed out anthropologists yet? This needs to be studied. To be learned.”

  I was excited. I would understand new things, things my foreparents had not known. Very few of the aerokratois seemed to care about learning. They had a desperate air about them, and only cared about one thing: the Great Repair.

  But this aerokrat seemed different.

  “We don’t have time,” the others told Bob. “The repairs must continue if we want to make the launch window. We have to fix the ship first, then we can study the whiffets with whatever time we have left. We can leave the scientists behind.” They made ‘laughed’ again.

  “That would be alright by me,” one of them said.

  I stood and watched them all.

  That was the day I was bonded to my aerokrat. The cycle of learning new things continued.

  Huddled under the root of the tree in the steady rain by myself, I sorted through long buried, and a few recent, happy memories. They comforted me.

  • • •

  More of my fur had grown in by morning. I took a few moments to carefully groom myself with twigs, trying to comb over the few bare patches still left in my fur.

  It was the fourth time I’d lost and regrown my fur. I was proud of the memories I imparted to each of my children with every new generation I sired.

  The mud hadn’t dried, but it was walkable. Outside the tree line, bare ground stretched for miles and miles. Big yellow machines roved over the roads, driven by aerokratois inside.