from The Far Reaches
Interviewer: It must feel a little strange to spend all this time preparing for something that you aren’t actually going to do.
Roy Court: Except that I am. When the package unfolds, the Roy that comes out of the assembler is going to remember having this exact conversation with you. It’s just that he’s going to be on some other planet trying to figure out how to restart the human race, and I’m going to be here worrying about my taxes. [laughs]
Interviewer: I can’t imagine knowing there’s some other me out there.
Roy: It’s not really going to be like that, though. We’ve located tens of thousands of exoplanets that look promising for colonization, but the closest really good candidates are fifteen, twenty light-years out. We call it “slow light” for a reason. The beams we’re transmitting aren’t quite as speedy as the normal stuff. That’s four, maybe five decades before the first unfold could set up a transmitter and send us a hello. We’re all mortal here. Those other Roys are going to be doing what they do long after I’m gone.
“Okay, I’m going to start the anesthetic in a few seconds here. You might get a little light-headed,” the technician said. She was a petite redhead with a small chin and dainty little teeth. If they’d met at a bar, Roy might have tried flirting with her.
Instead, he put a hand in his pocket, reassuring himself that the little velvet box really was where he thought it would be, then nodded. “Copy that.”
She shifted, put a needle into the drip feed going to his arm, and made a little sound that seemed like satisfaction. “Okay. Just count backward for me from ten to one.”
“Ten, nine, eight, seven—”
Roy opened his eyes. He was alone in the landing couch, just the way he was supposed to be. He lay there for a little while, getting used to the feeling of his body. His arms and legs felt heavy, like he’d just had ten hours of hard sleep. The knot that always seemed to rest in his belly had untied itself. He felt great.
The room itself was small, spartan, engineered to have not just the least mass but the least information that the package would have to encode. It seemed silly to take a snapshot of two hundred human bodies and brains and then try to economize with simplistic shelving, but here he was. He checked his pocket. The box was still there.
“What’s the word, folks?” he said.
“Scan went great, Roy,” Sandor, the director of operations, said through the speakers. “No data loss, minimal overhead.”
“Great. That means I can retire now?”
“Wait a few minutes to get your legs back before you start running down the street, but yeah, man. We did it.”
Roy smiled. After three years of active training, it felt a little anticlimactic. He’d come into the program at thirty years old with six
six years as an officer in Air Command behind him, a dual master’s in engineering and applied math, and he’d still barely qualified. The program had been boot camp and graduate school and team-building intensives all in one. And this was the last time he’d be looking up at the gray ceiling of the package module. The last time he’d be talking to Sandor and Chakrabarti and Foch. The last day he’d spend with most of the team.
Maybe not all of them, though. There was room to hope.
The farewell banquet was the next day at a hotel ballroom just off the base. Three hundred and fifty people, mostly women, mostly in their late twenties, around fifty tables with ceramic pumpkins for centerpieces and plates of rubbery chicken or gritty lentil tacos. An open bar. Sandor had given a tipsy speech about the nobility of the human soul and the work of becoming not just a multiplanetary but a multisystem species and started weeping. It had actually been pretty moving, in the moment. The president of the National Space Agency sent a message of congratulations and thanks that had been projected onto a blank wall behind the empty bandstand.
Now, Roy was leaning back in his chair with a whiskey sour in his hand while Zhang Bao and Emily Pupky leaned in on either side, talking across him. After three years of a strict no-alcohol policy, even the watered-down drink was hitting him hard.
“Bringing men at all was a mistake,” Emily said. “No offense, Roy. But every male in the package is one less uterus. And there are what? Fifteen hundred sperm samples? We’re going to kick founder effect’s ass.” She pointed an exuberant finger at Bao. “Kick its ass.”
“Replacement is an issue, yes,” Bao said. “But how many babies are we really going to need in the first stage?”
“We’ll have to have some pretty fast or there won’t be anyone to do the work when we get old. Populations with inverted age distribution—”
“It’s going to have to be a game-day decision,” Bao said. “Every situation is going to be different. And really, Emily, do you want to commit to living the rest of your life without cock?”
Emily cackled. “You’re going to be a lucky man, Roy.”
“Oh, not me,” Roy said. “I’ve stood my watch. Now I’m going back to Ohio and looking for a job.”
He caught sight of Anjula across the room. She was wearing a pale-yellow dress that brought out the warmth of her skin. Her hair was flowing down one shoulder, and her smile was the same wry near-smirk he’d loved and hated and loved again.
Now or never, he thought. He teetered on never, then shifted his chair back. “Doctors. You’ll excuse me, I hope, from your very erudite conversation on the long-term value of cock.”
He got stopped three times as he made his way across the ballroom, people he now knew as well as his own family, all saying their
goodbyes. He disengaged as quickly from each teary farewell as politely as he could. Anjula was putting on her coat when he reached her.
“Hey there, former wife,” he said, the way he often did.
“Hey there, former husband.”
“Taking off?”
“Yeah. Traveling early tomorrow.”
“Let me walk you out.”
They passed into the hotel lobby, a fantasy of black tile and fluted columns with a wide fountain along one wall. Megan Lee from the engineering team waved from across the room, looking wistful. Gabriel Hu, head of their data operations team, was sprawled on one of the couches, grinning drunkenly at everyone who passed but not making a scene. Anjula paused and bowed to him. Gabriel, unspeaking, inclined his head and waved his hand like an emperor accepting the obeisance of his subjects. They both chuckled, and Anjula moved on, Roy at her side. He didn’t touch her arm, and she didn’t lean against him. They knew each other too well for that.
“We pulled it off,” he said.
“We did. I should thank you.”
“For what?”
“Not making them choose between us. I know admin was concerned those first couple years.”
“I can see why. People get divorced, they don’t always play well together after. But I can bounce that right back at you. If you’d pushed the point, there’s no reason to think I’m the one they’d have kept.”
They reached the main doors and stepped out into the night. A warm breeze was blowing from the east, carrying the smell of the ocean. The transports waited in a sedate line, ready to whisk hotel guests anywhere in the city. The stars shone above them, billions of points of light pressing down through the backsplash of the city. They stood together for a moment, looking up, each with their own thoughts.
“I’m glad I got to know you again,” Roy said. “It feels like a blessing after . . . you know.”
“We were too young. Everyone gets to be an idiot at nineteen.”
“Here’s to getting old, right? But we’ve got a few good years left in us.”
“I hope so,” she said.
When she turned to look at him, he had the box out and open. The old ring glimmered in the new light. She looked from it to him. Her expression was surprise. Then horror.
“Oh God, Roy,” she said. “No.”
Interviewer: It’s odd that this is the application we’re making
of the Hamze-Grau slow light, isn’t it? If we can make copies of things from . . . what? Enriched light? Shouldn’t we be using this to make habitats for people here on Earth? Medical supplies for war zones? Food?
Anjula Farah: Not really. It’s an economics question. The energy it would take to manufacture something using slow light is just an order of magnitude more than it would take using traditional means. Slow light can build you a house; it’ll just cost a hundred times the energy a hammer and nails would. What makes this interesting isn’t the duplication possibilities, though that is fascinating in its own right. It’s the distribution.
Interviewer: Distribution?
Anjula: Moving matter across interstellar space has never made sense from an energy expenditure standpoint. And in that use case, suddenly duplication using slow light begins to make economic sense. There are other ways to manufacture things. But delivering and unfolding a package on an alien world light-years away in the galaxy? This is the only way to do it.
Interviewer: Going back to economics, what’s the return on this investment?
Anjula: Lots of people will give you the “all your eggs in one basket” argument for spreading out to multiple solar systems. But that’s not the reason for me. For me, some chances you take just because the possibilities are beautiful.
“Okay. Just count backward for me from ten to one.”
“Ten, nine, eight, seven—”
Roy opened his eyes. He was alone in the landing couch, just the way he was supposed to be. He lay for a little while, getting used to the feeling of his body. His arms and legs felt heavy, like he’d just had ten hours of hard sleep. The knot that always seemed to rest in his belly had untied itself. He felt great.
“What’s the word, folks?”
The silence that followed seemed to last an eternity. The voice that answered him wasn’t Sandor. It was Gabriel Hu.
“Well. Holy shit.”
Roy sat up a little too fast, and the room swam around him. Adrenaline fought against the fading anesthetic and slowly, surely won. The public address system clicked as a new connection came on. Elizabet Aldo’s voice was as bright, excited, and controlled as a puppy on a leash. “All teams, please report to your stations for startup checks. Local gravity is a pleasant one g, but let’s not hurry, people. We’re all still a little groggy.”
They weren’t on the base. They weren’t on Earth. They’d unfolded the package.
The room around him, the gray, softly lit hall, wasn’t the one he’d been scanned in. Hell, he wasn’t the Roy Court who’d been scanned. The idea was simultaneously everything he’d hoped for and still totally surreal.
He walked down the hall, keeping one hand on the wall even though he didn’t feel unsteady. The air smelled like cleaning supplies and dust filters, the same as it always did. The gravity was heavy but not oppressive, so wherever they were, it wasn’t on one of the outlier worlds with significantly more or less mass than Earth. But the sound was different. He couldn’t put his finger on it at first, but there was a different resonance in the quiet. Wind hitting the base station from some unaccustomed direction. Or maybe rain or hail outside. A new outside that humans had never even seen before. Roy let that sink in for a moment.
He fought the temptation to detour through the observation deck. He wanted to see this new world, and if he was being honest, he wanted to see if Anjula was there, giving in to the same temptation. The first moment looking on the planet they were there to remake would be a hell of a time to pull out a ring.
Megan Lee was already at the reactor room when he arrived. The room was small and jammed to overflowing with their equipment. With both engineers at their workstations, they had to be careful not to elbow each other. Below them, the pocket reactor lay quiet. The control panels were up, everything on standby, waiting to kindle the little nuclear fire that would keep their batteries topped up for—if things went right—the rest of their lives. Megan looked stunned. She looked like he felt.
“Ain’t this a kick in the pants,” she said.
“You know,” Roy said, “it’s exactly what we planned for, and somehow, I’m still really surprised. You and me and all the others? We’re the first people to travel between stars.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d had the thought. It was the first time it had been true. Roy grinned.
“Prepare for check, primary reactor,” Elizabet Aldo said. “And go.”
Megan started the system running. Each computer and subsystem cycled through its routine. Each indicator came up within its expected range.
“I’m seeing nothing but green,” Megan said. “Confirm?”
“Confirmed,” Roy said. “I’ve got green across the board.”
“Admin,” Megan said. “This is engineering. Primary reactor is good to go.”
Roy pulled up the start sequence, just waiting for the order to begin. Over the speaker, he heard Elizabet, but only distantly, like she had her hand over the microphone. Megan frowned. The voices over the speaker grew harsh. A drop of unease spilled into Roy’s blood.
“So, hold up for a second,” Gabriel said over the speaker. “Megan? Roy? Tell
Tell me you haven’t started that reactor.”
“We haven’t started the reactor,” Roy said. “What’s going on?”
Gabriel’s sigh shuddered. “Turns out that if you had, it would have killed us.”
[Roy Court is looking into the camera. The right side of his face is visibly blistered. The image stutters, freezes, and begins again.]
Roy Court: There is . . . there is a faulty coolant pressure sensor. I think it’s in the H line. It isn’t showing that there’s backflow from a stuck valve. Um. We’re on battery now. I don’t know how long we have. We’re going to try and send this out. The others are . . . Anjula’s . . . um . . . Okay. Okay. Any future missions, we need to get this to them as soon as they unfold. Like to the minute. It’s important . . . It’s critical.
[He shakes his head. His hands tremble.]
Roy: We got so far, and now this. It’s just not fucking fair.
Normally, it wasn’t a meeting Roy would have attended, but since the fault had been in his equipment and the warning had come from some version of him, Elizabet had brought both engineers to the table. Gabriel Hu was there, and Anjula. Kiko, the head of medical and psychological support. Roy and Anjula were two of the oldest people there. Most of the package had been built with people in their twenties. Roy was the oldest man on the planet. Probably the oldest within a dozen light-years.
The meeting room was small, like everything. Four benches around a fake wood-grain table. Elizabet had a mug of smoky tea beside her. The light was soft and full spectrum, designed to look like a sunny afternoon. Outside, it was stormy. If he listened carefully, sometimes he could hear the thunder.
Megan Lee gave a quick report—the stuck valve had been identified, the faulty sensor had been replaced, the reactor was up and running. Then she got out of the way to let the site group report.
“The good news is that it’s a better fit than we’d hoped. Same size and water percentage as Earth. One moon, about the same size as Luna, but about five percent farther out,” Anjula said. “The sun’s older. There’s only one gas giant, and the asteroid belt between here and there is much, much thicker, and it has a lot of activity outside the ecliptic. You get the feeling something bad happened there. The atmosphere is plausible. High nitrogen, enough oxygen that it’s pretty clear there’s something respirating out there, or was at some point. The big challenge is that there’s a lot of chlorine dioxide too.”
“Bleach planet.
So no walks outside,” Elizabet said.
“Not if you enjoy having lungs.”
“Something we can terraform?” Megan asked.
“We? No,” Anjula said. “Our great-grandchildren can maybe get started on it. In theory, perfectly doable, but we have a lot of infrastructure to build and a lot of surviving to do first.”
Roy had to pull his attention away from her mouth and the memory of the way the lip balm she’d liked in college had tasted after they’d kissed. This was a serious, professional meeting as much as anything that had happened during their years of training. There was no room for him to be mooning over her like they were kids again. His hand shifted to his pocket, checking that the little box was still there.
“What’s the bad news?” Elizabet asked.
“We’re still figuring out where we are. We were expecting some lensing and occlusion to make things weird, but beyond some very consistent landmarks like the galactic core, everything seems to have moved around a lot.”
“Which means what?” Megan asked, folding her arms. Roy knew the answer before Anjula spoke, but mostly because it was the kind of thing they’d talked about back in the before times.
“It would be stranger if things hadn’t,” Anjula said. “Everything moves, everything ages, everything changes. That’s normal. Stars shift spectra; they move in relation to each other.” She lifted her hands, fingers splayed just a little like the feathers of a peacock. It was a gesture he remembered her mother using too. Genetics or mirroring. “We’ll figure it out. If we can get an idea of how long has passed since we left Earth, that’ll help a lot.”
“Yes, well,” Gabriel Hu said. “Our ears are up and listening.”
Roy shifted in his seat. This was the meat of the proceeding. The part they’d all come for. Gabriel knew that too, and he played it for effect, stroking his nonexistent beard. In another life, the data operations administrator would have been a big name in community theater.
“We were doing our checks against the original package data. Making sure that the unfold hadn’t dropped anything and that the functional package that arrived matched the expected data? It all looks fine, by the way. The alert interrupted us, and of course thank God it did. The data stream,” he said, then paused. Roy shifted in his seat. Anjula glanced at him with a do you believe this guy look that no one else would be able to parse. “The packet stream is still coming in.”
Elizabet frowned. ...
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