Children of Time

1.1 JUST A BARREL OF MONKEYS

There were no windows in the Brin 2 facility – rotation meant that ‘outside’ was always ‘down’, underfoot, out of mind. The wall screens told a pleasant fiction, a composite view of the world below that ignored their constant spin, showing the planet as hanging stationary-still off in space: the green marble to match the blue marble of home, twenty light years away. Earth had been green, in her day, though her colours had faded since. Perhaps never as green as this beautifully crafted world though, where even the oceans glittered emerald with the phytoplankton maintaining the oxygen balance within its atmosphere. How delicate and many-sided was the task of building a living monument that would remain stable for geological ages to come.

It had no officially confirmed name beyond its astronomical designation, although there was a strong vote for ‘Simiana’ amongst some of the less imaginative crewmembers. Doctor Avrana Kern now looked out upon it and thought only of Kern’s World. Her project, her dream, her planet. The first of many, she decided.

This is the future. This is where mankind takes its next great step. This is where we become gods.

‘This is the future,’ she said aloud. Her voice would sound in every crewmember’s auditory centre, all nineteen of them, though fifteen were right here in the control hub with her. Not the true hub, of course – the gravity-denuded axle about which they revolved: that was for power and processing, and their payload.

‘This is where mankind takes its next great step.’ Her speech had taken more of her time than any technical details over the last two days. She almost went on with the line about them becoming gods, but that was for her only. Far too controversial, given the Non Ultra Natura clowns back home. Enough of a stink had been raised over projects like hers already. Oh, the differences between the current Earth factions went far deeper: social, economic, or simply us and them, but Kern had got the Brin launched – all those years ago – against mounting opposition. By now the whole idea had become a kind of scapegoat for the divisions of the human race. Bickering primates, the lot of them. Progress is what matters. Fulfilling the potential of humanity, and of all other life. She had always been one of the fiercest opponents of the growing conservative backlash most keenly exemplified by the Non Ultra Natura terrorists. If they had their way, we’d all end up back in the caves. Back in the trees. The whole point of civilization is that we exceed the limits of nature, you tedious little primitives.

‘We stand on others’ shoulders, of course.’ The proper line, that of accepted scientific humility, was, ‘on the shoulders of giants’, but she had not got where she was by bowing the knee to past generations. Midgets, lots and lots of midgets, she thought, and then – she could barely keep back the appalling giggle – on the shoulders of monkeys.

At a thought from her, one wallscreen and their Mind’s Eye HUDs displayed the schematics of Brin 2 for them all. She wanted to direct their attention and lead them along with her towards the proper appreciation of her – sorry, their – triumph. There: the needle of the central core encircled by the ring of life and science that was their torus-shaped world. At one end of the core was the unlovely bulge of the Sentry Pod, soon to be cast adrift to become the universe’s loneliest and longest research post. The opposite end of the needle sported the Barrel and the Flask. Contents: monkeys and the future, respectively.

‘Particularly I have to thank the engineering teams under Doctors Fallarn and Medi for their tireless work in reformatting–’ and she almost now said ‘Kern’s World’ without meaning to – ‘our subject planet to provide a safe and nurturing environment for our great project.’ Fallarn and Medi were well on their way back to Earth, of course, their fifteen-year work completed, their thirty-year return journey begun. It was all stage-setting, though, to make way for Kern and her dream. We are – I am – what all this work is for.

A journey of twenty light years home. Whilst thirty years drag by on Earth, only twenty will pass for Fallarn and Medi in their cold coffins. For them, their voyage is nearly as fast as light. What wonders we can accomplish!

From her viewpoint, engines to accelerate her to most of the speed of light were no more than pedestrian tools to move her about a universe that Earth’s biosphere was about to inherit. Because humanity may be fragile in ways we cannot dream, so we cast our net wide and then wider…

Human history was balanced on a knife edge. Millennia of ignorance, prejudice, superstition and desperate striving had brought them at last to this: that humankind would beget new sentient life in its own image. Humanity would no longer be alone. Even in the unthinkably far future, when Earth itself had fallen in fire and dust, there would be a legacy spreading across the stars – an infinite and expanding variety of Earth-born life diverse enough to survive any reversal of fortune until the death of the whole universe, and perhaps even beyond that. Even if we die, we will live on in our children.

Let the NUNs preach their dismal all-eggs-in-one-basket creed of human purity and supremacy, she thought. We will out-evolve them. We will leave them behind. This will be the first of a thousand worlds that we will give life to.

For we are gods, and we are lonely, so we shall create…

Back home, things were tough, or so the twenty-year-old images indicated. Avrana had skimmed dispassionately over the riots, the furious debates, the demonstrations and violence, thinking only, How did we ever get so far with so many fools in the gene pool? The Non Ultra Natura lobby were only the most extreme of a whole coalition of human political factions – the conservative, the philosophical, even the diehard religious – who looked at progress and said that enough was enough. Who fought tooth and nail against further engineering of the human genome, against the removal of limits on AI, and against programs like Avrana’s own.

And yet they’re losing.

The terraforming would still be going on elsewhere. Kern’s World was just one of many planets receiving the attentions of people like Fallarn and Medi, transformed from inhospitable chemical rocks – Earth-like only in approximate size and distance from the sun – into balanced ecosystems that Kern could have walked on without a suit in only minor discomfort. After the monkeys had been delivered and the Sentry Pod detached to monitor them, those other gems were where her attention would next be drawn. We will seed the universe with all the wonders of Earth.

In her speech, which she was barely paying attention to, she meandered down a list of other names, from here or at home. The person she really wanted to thank was herself. She had fought for this, her engineered longevity allowing her to carry the debate across several natural human lifetimes. She had clashed in the financiers’ rooms and in the laboratories, at academic symposiums and on mass entertainment feeds just to make this happen.

I, I have done this. With your hands have I built, with your eyes have I measured, but the mind is mine alone.

Her mouth continued along its prepared course, the words boring her even more than they presumably bored her listeners. The real audience for this speech would receive it in twenty years’ time: the final confirmation back home of the way things were due to be. Her mind touched base with the Brin 2’s hub. Confirm Barrel systems, she pinged into her relay link with the facility’s control computer; it was a check that had become a nervous habit of late.

Within tolerance, it replied. And if she probed behind that bland summary, she would see precise readouts of the lander craft, its state of readiness, even down to the vital signs of its ten-thousand-strong primate cargo, the chosen few who would inherit, if not the Earth, then at least this planet, whatever it would be called.

Whatever they would eventually call it, once the uplift nanovirus had taken them that far along the developmental road. The biotechs estimated that a mere thirty or forty monkey generations would bring them to the stage where they might make contact with the Sentry Pod and its lone human occupant.

Alongside the Barrel was the Flask: the delivery system for the virus that would accelerate the monkeys along their way – they would stride, in a mere century or two, across physical and mental distances that had taken humanity millions of long and hostile years.

Another group of people to thank, for she herself was no biotech specialist. She had seen the specs and the simulations, though, and expert systems had examined the theory and summarized it in terms that she, a mere polymath genius, could understand. The virus was clearly an impressive piece of work, as far as she could grasp it. Infected individuals would produce offspring mutated in a number of useful ways: greater brain size and complexity, greater body size to accommodate it, more flexible behavioural paths, swifter learning… The virus would even recognize the presence of infection in other individuals of the same species, so as to promote selective breeding, the best of the best giving birth to even better. It was a whole future in a microscopic shell, almost as smart, in its single-minded little way, as the creatures that it would be improving. It would interact with the host genome at a deep level, replicate within its cells like a new organelle, passing itself on to the host’s offspring until the entire species was subject to its benevolent contagion. No matter how much change the monkeys underwent, that virus would adapt and adjust to whatever genome it was partnered with, analysing and modelling and improvising with whatever it inherited – until something had been engineered that could look its creators in the eye and understand.

She had sold it to the people back home by describing how colonists would reach the planet then, descending from the skies like deities to meet their new people. Instead of a harsh, untamed world, a race of uplifted sentient aides and servants would welcome their makers. That was what she had told the boardrooms and the committees back on Earth, but it had never been the point of the exercise for her. The monkeys were the point, and what they would become.

This was one of the things the NUNs were most incensed about. They shouted about making superbeings out of mere beasts. In truth, like spoiled children, it was sharing that they objected to. Only-child humanity craved the sole attention of the universe. Like so many other projects hoisted as political issues, the virus’s development had been fraught with protests, sabotage, terrorism and murder.

And yet we triumph over our own base nature at last, Kern reflected with satisfaction. And of course, there was a tiny grain of truth to the insults the NUNs threw her way, because she didn’t care about colonists or the neo-imperialistic dreams of her fellows. She wanted to make new life, in her image as much as in humanity’s. She wanted to know what might evolve, what society, what understandings, when her monkeys were left to their own simian devices… To Avrana Kern, this was her price, her reward for exercising her genius for the good of the human race: this experiment; this planetary what-if. Her efforts had opened up a string of terra-formed worlds, but her price was that the firstborn would be hers, and home to her new-made people.

She was aware of an expectant silence and realized that she had got to the end of her speech, and now everyone thought she was just adding gratuitous suspense to a moment that needed no gilding.

‘Mr Sering, are you in position?’ she asked on open channel, for everyone’s benefit. Sering was the volunteer, the man they were going to leave behind. He would orbit their planet-sized laboratory as the long years turned, locked in cold sleep until the time came for him to become mentor to a new race of sentient primates. She almost envied him, for he would see and hear and experience things that no other human ever had. He would be the new Hanuman: the monkey god.

Almost envied, but in the end Kern rather preferred to be departing to undertake other projects. Let others become gods of mere single worlds. She herself would stride the stars and head up the pantheon.

‘I am not in position, no.’ And apparently he felt that was also deserving of a wider audience, because he had broadcast it on the general channel.

Kern felt a stab of annoyance. I cannot physically do everything myself. Why is it that other people so often fail to meet my standards, when I rely on them? To Sering alone she sent, ‘Perhaps you would explain why?’

‘I was hoping to be able to say a few words, Doctor Kern.’

It would be his last contact with his species for a long time, she knew, and it seemed appropriate. If he could make a good showing then it would only add to her legend. She held ready on the master comms, though, setting him on a few seconds’ delay, just in case he became maudlin or started saying something inappropriate.

‘This is a turning point in human history,’ Sering’s voice – always slightly mournful – came to her, and then through her to everyone else. His image was in their Mind’s Eye HUDs, with the collar of his bright orange environment suit done up high to the chin. ‘I had to think long and hard before committing myself to this course, as you can imagine. But some things are too important. Sometimes you have to just do the right thing, whatever the cost.’

Kern nodded, pleased with that. Be a good monkey and finish up soon, Sering. Some of us have legacies to build.

‘We have come so far, and still we fall into the oldest errors,’ Sering continued doggedly. ‘We’re standing here with the universe in our grasp and, instead of furthering our own destinies, we connive at our own obsolescence.’

Her attention had drifted a little and, by the time she realized what he had said, the words had passed on to the crew. She registered suddenly a murmur of concerned messages between them, and even simple spoken words whispered between those closest to her. Doctor Mercian meanwhile sent her an alert on another channel: ‘Why is Sering in the engine core?’

Sering should not be in the engine core of the needle. Sering should be in the Sentry Pod, ready to take his place in orbit – and in history.

She cut Sering off from the crew and sent him an angry demand to know what he thought he was doing. For a moment his avatar stared at her in her visual field, then it lip-synced to his voice.

‘You have to be stopped, Doctor Kern. You and all your kind – your new humans, new machines, new species. If you succeed here, then there will be other worlds – you’ve said so yourself, and I know they’re terraforming them even now. It ends here. Non Ultra Natura! No greater than nature.’

She wasted vital moments of potential dissuasion by resorting to personal abuse, until he spoke again.

‘I’ve cut you off, Doctor. Do the same to me if you wish, but for now I’m going to speak and you don’t get to interrupt me.’

She was trying to override him, hunting through the control computer’s systems to find what he had done, but he had locked her out elegantly and selectively. There were whole areas of the facility’s systems that just did not appear on her mental schematic, and when she quizzed the computer about them, it refused to acknowledge their existence. None of them was mission critical – not the Barrel, not the Flask, not even the Sentry Pod – therefore none were the systems she had been obsessively checking every day.

Not mission critical, perhaps, but facility critical.

‘He’s disabled the reactor safeties,’ Mercian reported. ‘What’s going on? Why’s he in the engine core at all?’ Alarm but not outright panic, which was a good finger in the air for the mood of the crew all around.

He is in the engine core because his death will be instant and total and therefore probably painless, Kern surmised. She was already moving, to the surprise of the others. She was heading up, climbing into the access shaft that led to the slender central pylon of the station, heading away from the outer floor that remained ‘down’ only so long as she was close to it; climbing up out of that spurious gravity well towards the long needle they all revolved around. There was a flurry of increasingly concerned messages. Voices called out at her heels. Some of them would follow her, she knew.

Sering was continuing blithely: ‘This is not even the beginning, Doctor Kern.’ His tone was relentlessly deferential even in rebellion. ‘Back home it will have already started. Back home it is probably already over. In another few years, maybe, you’ll hear that Earth and our future have been taken back for the humans. No uplifted monkeys, Doctor Kern. No godlike computers. No freakshows of the human form. We’ll have the universe to ourselves, as we were intended to – as was always our destiny. On all the colonies, in the solar system and out, our agents will have made their move. We will have taken power – with the consent of the majority, you understand, Doctor Kern.’

And she was lighter and lighter, hauling herself towards an ‘up’ that was becoming an ‘in’. She knew she should be cursing Sering, but what was the point if he would never hear her?

It was not such a long way to the weightlessness of the needle’s hollow interior. She had her choice then: either towards the engine core, where Sering had no doubt taken steps to ensure that he would not be disturbed; or away. Away, in a very final sense.

She could override anything Sering had done. She had full confidence in the superiority of her abilities. It would take time, though. If she cast herself that way down the needle, towards Sering and his traps and locked barriers, then time would be something she would not have the benefit of.

‘And if the powers-that-be refuse us, Doctor Kern,’ that hateful voice continued in her ear, ‘then we will fight. If we must wrest mankind’s destiny back by force, then we shall.’

She barely took in what he was saying, but a cold sense of fear was creeping into her mind – not from the danger to her and the Brin 2, but what he was saying about Earth and the colonies. A war? Impossible. Not even the NUNs… But it was true there had been some incidents – assassinations, riots, bombs. The whole of Europa Base had been compromised. The NUNs were spitting into the inevitable storm of manifest destiny, though. She had always believed that. Such outbursts represented the last throes of humanity’s under-evolvers.

She was now heading the other way, distancing herself from the engine core as though the Brin had enough space within it for her to escape the coming blast. She was utterly rational, however. She knew exactly where she was going.

Ahead of her was the circular portal to the Sentry Pod. Only on seeing it did she realize that some part of her mind – the part she always relied on to finesse the more complex calculations – had already fully understood the current situation and discerned the one slim-but-possible way out.

This was where Sering was supposed to be. This was the slow boat to the future that he – in a sane timeline – would have been piloting. Now she ordered the door to open, relieved to discover that this – the one piece of equipment that was actually his particular business – seemed to have remained free of Sering’s meddling.

The first explosion came, and she thought it was the last one. The Brin creaked and lurched around her, but the engine core remained stable – as evidenced by the fact that she herself had not been disintegrated. She tuned back into the wild whirl of frantic messaging between the crew. Sering had rigged the escape pods. He didn’t want anyone avoiding the fate he had decreed for himself. Had he somehow forgotten the Sentry Pod?

The detonating pods would push the Brin 2 out of position, drifting either towards the planet or off into space. She had to get clear.

The door opened at her command, and she had the Sentry hub run a diagnostic on the release mechanism. There was so little space inside, just the cold-sleep coffin – don’t think of it as a coffin! – and the termini of its associated systems.

The hub was querying her – she was not the right person, nor was she wearing the proper gear for prolonged cold sleep. But I don’t intend to be here for centuries, just long enough to ride it out. She swiftly overrode its quibbles, and by that time the diagnostics had pinpointed Sering’s tampering, or rather identified, by process of elimination, those parts of the release process that he had erased from its direct notice.

Sounds from outside suggested that the best course of action was to order the door closed, and then lock the systems so that nobody from outside could intrude on her.

She climbed into the cold-sleep tank, and around that time the banging started; those others of the crew who had come to the same realization as her, but slightly later. She blocked out their messaging. She blocked out Sering too, who was obviously not going to tell her anything useful now. It was better if she didn’t have to share her head with anyone except the hub control systems.

She had no idea how much time she had, but she worked with the trademark balance of speed and care that had got her where she was now. Got me leading the Brin 2 facility and got me here in the Sentry Pod. What a clever, doomed monkey I am. The muffled banging was more insistent, but the pod only had room for one. Her heart had always been hard, but she found that she had to harden it still further, and not think of all those names and faces, her loyal colleagues, that she and Sering between them were condemning to an explosive end.

Which I myself have not yet escaped, she reminded herself. And then she had it: a work-around jury-rigged release path that avoided Sering’s ghost systems. Would it work? She had no opportunity for a dry run, nor had she any other options. Nor, she suspected, any time.

Release, she ordered the hub, and then shouted down all of the different ways it was programmed to ask ‘Are you sure?’, until she felt the movement of mechanisms around her.

Then it wanted her to go into cold sleep immediately, as had been the plan, but she made it wait. If the captain was not going down with her ship, she would at least watch its demise from a distance. And how much distance would that need?

There were, by then, several thousand messages clamouring for her attention. Every member of the crew wanted to talk to her, but she had nothing to say to any of them.

The Sentry Pod had no windows either. Had she wanted, it could have shown her a HUD display of the rapidly receding Brin 2, as her little capsule of life fell into its prearranged orbit.

Now she returned to the Brin’s systems, her internal comms boosted by the Sentry hub, and instructed it, Launch the Barrel.

She wondered if it was just poor timing, but in retrospect that had probably been Sering’s first and more carefully performed task – subtle enough to slip by in all her checks, because of course the actual mechanical release for Flask and Barrel was virtually beneath her notice. On the shoulders of others, she had said, but she had not stopped to think about those beneath her in that pyramid of achievement. Even the lowliest of them had to agree to bear her weight, or all of it would come falling down.

She saw the flare not even in her mind’s eye, but through the brief flower of damage reports from the Brin 2’s computers, as all of her colleagues and her facility, and Sering the traitor, and all of her work became abruptly no more than a rapidly disassociating cloud of fragments, a ghost-breath of dissipating atmosphere, with some unrecognizable organic remains.

Correct course and stabilize. She had been expecting a shockwave, but the Sentry Pod was already far enough away, and the Brin 2’s energy and matter were so miniscule, compared to the distances involved, that barely any adjustment was required to ensure the Sentry Pod remained within its programmed orbit.

Show me. She braced herself for the image, but, really, at this remove it seemed almost nothing. A flash; a tiny burned boat of all her ideas and friends.

In the final analysis it had all been nothing more than a barrel of over-evolved monkeys, after all. From this distance, against the vast and heedless backdrop of Everything Else, it was hard to say why any of it had ever mattered at all.

Distress beacon, she ordered. Because they would need to know, on Earth, what had happened. They had to know that they must come and collect her, wake her like Sleeping Beauty. After all, she was Doctor Kern. She was the future of the human race, right here. They needed her.

Twenty long years for her signal to reach Earth. Far more than that for the rescue to come back, even with the best fusion engines employed to accelerate to three-quarter light speed. But her frail body would survive that long in cold sleep – and more than that.

Some hours later, she saw the end of it: she saw the Barrel hit atmosphere.

It was not on the planned trajectory, the conflagration of the Brin 2 having sent it off on a tangent so that it narrowly avoided being hurled forever into empty space. Its cargo would not care, in the long run. The Barrel burned, streaking like a meteor through the atmosphere of the green world. Somehow the thought of the insensate terror that its primate occupants must be going through, as they died in ignorance by fear and burning, touched her more than the death of her fellow humans. And wouldn’t Sering claim that as evidence that he was right?

From force of habit, a redundant professional thoroughness, she located the Flask, watching as the smaller canister fell through the atmosphere at a gentler angle, delivering its viral cargo to a world devoid of the simians it was intended for.

We can always get more monkeys. That was a curious mantra, but it made her feel better. The uplift virus would last for millennia. The project would survive the treachery and death of its creators. She herself would ensure it.

Listen for a change in radio signals. Wake me when you hear it, she instructed.

The pod computer was not happy about that. It required more exacting parameters. Kern thought over all the developments back home she might want to be appraised of. Listing them all was tantamount to trying to predict the future.

Then give me options.

Her HUD streamed with possibilities. The pod computer was a sophisticated piece of engineering, complex enough that it could feign sentience, if not quite own to it.

Upload facility, she noted. It was not the most pleasant thought in the world, but was she not always saying how much easier life would be if she could arrange everything herself? The pod could upload an image of her consciousness into itself. Albeit an imperfect copy, it would form a Kern-computer composite that would be able to react to external events in a simulation of her own best judgement. She scanned through the caveats and notes – more cutting-edge technology that they were due to have pioneered. Over time it was predicted that the AI network would further incorporate the uploaded Kern so that the composite would be able to make finer and finer distinctions. Potentially the end result would be something smarter and more capable than the simple sum total of human and machine combined.

Do it, she instructed, lying back and waiting for the pod to begin scanning her brain. Just let them be quick with the rescue party.

1.2 BRAVE LITTLE HUNTRESS

She is Portia, and she is hunting.

She is eight millimetres long but she is a tiger within her tiny world, fierce and cunning. Like all spiders, she has a body of two parts. Her small abdomen holds her book-lungs and the bulk of her gut. Her head-body is dominated by two huge eyes facing forwards for perfect binocular vision, beneath a pair of tiny tufts that crown her like horns. She is fuzzy with hair in broken patterns of brown and black. To predators, she looks more dead leaf than live prey.

She waits. Below her formidable eyes her fangs are flanked by limb-like mouthparts: her palps, coloured a startling white like a quivering moustache. Science has named her Portia labiata, just another unassuming species of jumping spider.

Her attention is fixed on another spider at home in its web. This is Scytodes pallida, longer-limbed and hunchbacked and able to spit toxic webbing. Scytodes specializes in catching and eating jumping spiders like Portia.

Portia specializes in eating spider-eating spiders, most of whom are larger and stronger than she.

Her eyes are remarkable. The visual acuity of a primate peers out from those pinhead-sized discs and the flexible chambers behind them, piecing together the world around her.

Portia has no thoughts. Her sixty thousand neurons barely form a brain, contrasted with a human’s one hundred billion. But something goes on in that tiny knot of tissue. She has already recognized her enemy, and knows its spit will make any frontal assault fatal. She has been playing with the edge of the Scytodes’s web, sending tactile lies to it of varying shades to see if it can be lured out. The target has twitched once or twice, but it will not be deceived.

This is what a few tens of thousands of neurons can do: Portia has tried and failed, variation after variation, homing in on those that evinced the most response, and now she will go about things differently.

Her keen eyes have been examining the surroundings of the web, the branches and twigs that hang over and below it. Somewhere in her little knot of neurons a three-dimensional map has been built up from her meticulous scrutiny, and she has plotted a painstaking course to where she may come at the Scytodes from above, like a minute assassin. The approach is not perfect, but it is the best the environment will allow, and her scrap of brain has worked all this out as a theoretical exercise ahead of time. The planned approach will take her out of sight of her prey for much of the journey, but even when her prey is beyond view, it will remain in her tiny mind.

If her prey was something other than Scytodes, then she would have different tactics – or would experiment until something worked. It usually does.

Portia’s ancestors have been making these calculations and decisions for millennia, each generation fractionally more accomplished because the best hunters are the ones that eat well and lay more eggs.

So far, so natural, and Portia is just about to set off on her quest when movement attracts her gaze.

Another of her species has arrived, a male. He has also been studying the Scytodes, but now his acute eyes are locked on her.

Past individuals of her species might have decided that the little male was a safer lunch than the Scytodes, and made plans accordingly, but now something changes. The presence of the male speaks to her. It is a complex new experience. The crouching figure there at the far side of the Scytodes’s web is not just prey/mate/irrelevant. There is an invisible connection strung between them. She does not quite grasp that he is something like her, but her formidable ability to calculate strategies has gained a new dimension. A new category appears that expands her options a hundredfold: ally.

For long minutes the two hunting spiders examine their mental maps while the Scytodes hangs patiently oblivious between them. Then Portia watches the male creep around the web’s edge a little. He waits for her to move. She does not. He moves again. At last he has got to where his presence changes her instinctive calculation of the odds.

She moves off along the course that she had been plotting out, creeping, jumping, descending by a thread, and all the while her mind retains its image of that three-dimensional world, and the two other spiders inside it.

At last she is in position above the Scytodes’s web, back in sight of the motionless male. She waits until he makes his move. He skitters on to the silken strands, cautiously testing his footing. His movements are mechanical, repetitive, as though he is just some fragment of dead leaf that has drifted into the web. The Scytodes shifts once, then remains still. A breeze shivers the web and the male moves more swiftly under cover of the white noise of the shaking strands.

He bounces and dances abruptly, speaking the language of the web in loud and certain terms: Prey! Prey here, trying to escape!

The Scytodes is instantly on the move and Portia strikes, dropping down behind her displaced enemy and sinking her fangs into it. Her poison immobilizes the other spider swiftly. The hunt is concluded.

Soon after, the little male returns and they regard one another, trying to build a new picture of their world. They feed. She is constantly on the verge of driving him away and yet that new dimension, that commonality, stays her fangs. He is prey. He is not prey.

Later, they hunt together again. They make a good team. Together they are able to take on targets and situations that, alone, either would have retreated from.

Eventually he is promoted from prey/not-prey to mate, because her behaviours are limited as regards males. After the act of mating, other instincts surface and their partnership comes to an end.

She lays her clutch, the many eggs of a very successful huntress.

Their children will be beautiful and brilliant and grow to twice her size, infected with the nanovirus that Portia and the male both carry. Further generations will be larger and brighter and more successful still, one after the other selectively evolving at a virally accelerated rate so that those best able to exploit this new advantage will dominate the gene pool of the future.

Portia’s children will inherit the world.

1.3 THE LIGHTS GO OUT

Doctor Avrana Kern awoke to a dozen complex feeds of information, none of which helped her restore her memories of what had just happened or why she was groggily returning to consciousness in a cold-sleep unit. She could not open her eyes; her entire body was cramping and there was nothing in her mental space except the overkill of information assailing her, every system of the Sentry Pod clamouring to report.

Eliza mode! she managed to instruct, feeling queasy, bloated, constipated and overstimulated all at once as the machinery of the coffin laboured to bring her back to something resembling active life.

‘Good morning, Doctor Kern,’ said the Sentry hub in her auditory centres. It had assumed a woman’s voice, strong and reassuring. Kern was not reassured. She wanted to ask why she was here in the Sentry Pod, but she could feel the answer continually just about to hit her and never quite landing.

Just give me something to get my memories back together! she ordered.

‘That is not recommended,’ the hub cautioned her.

If you want me to make any kind of decision— and then everything fell back into her head in pieces, dams breaking to unleash a flood of horrifying revelation. The Brin 2 was gone. Her colleagues were gone. The monkeys were gone. Everything was lost, except her.

And she had told the hub to wake her when the radio signals came.

She took what was intended to be a deep breath, but her chest would not work properly and she just wheezed. About time, she told the hub, for all that statement would be meaningless to the computer. Now it was talking to her, she instinctively felt she should converse with it as though it was human. This had always been a vexing side-effect of the Eliza mode. How much time has elapsed, Earth standard?

‘Fourteen years and seventy-two days, Doctor.’

That’s… She felt her throat open a little. ‘That can’t be…’ No point telling a computer it couldn’t be right, but it wasn’t right. It wasn’t long enough. Word couldn’t have got back to Earth and a rescue ship arrived back in that time. But then the hope set in. Of course, a ship had already been heading for her before Sering destroyed the Brin 2. No doubt the man’s status as a NUN agent had been uncovered long before, when their ridiculous uprising had failed. She was saved. Surely she was saved.

Initiate contact, she told the hub.

‘I’m afraid that is not possible, Doctor.’

She tutted and called up the systems feeds again, feeling better able to cope with them. Each part of the pod opened for her, confirming its working order. She checked the comms. Receivers were within tolerance. Transmitters were working – sending out her distress signal and also performing their primary function, broadcasting a complex set of messages to the planet below. Of course, it had been intended that some day that same planet would become the cradle to a new species that might receive and decode those messages. No chance of that now.

‘It’s all…’ Her croaky voice infuriated her. Clarify. What’s the problem?

‘I’m afraid that there is nothing to initiate contact with, Doctor,’ the hub’s Eliza mode told her politely. Her attention was then directed to a simulation of space surrounding them: planet, Sentry Hub. No ship from Earth.

Explain.

‘There has been a change in radio signals, Doctor. I require a Command decision as to its significance, I’m afraid.’

‘Will you stop saying, “I’m afraid”!’ she rasped angrily.

‘Of course, Doctor.’ And it would, she knew. That particular mannerism would be barred from its speech from that moment on. ‘Since you entered cold sleep, I have been monitoring signals from Earth.’

‘And?’ But Kern’s voice shook a little. Sering mentioned a war. Has there been news of a war? And, on the heels of that: Would the hub even know to wake me? It wouldn’t be able to filter for content like that. So what…?

It had been there, lost amidst the profusion of data, but the hub highlighted it now. Not a presence but an absence.

She wanted to ask it, What am I looking at? She wanted to tell it that it was wrong again. She wanted it to double check, as though it was not checking every single moment.

There were no more radio signals from Earth. The last trailing edge of them had passed the Sentry Pod by and, radiating out from Earth at the speed of light, were already out of date by twenty years as they fled past her into the void.

I want to hear the final twelve hours of signals.

She had thought that there would be too many of them but they were few, scattered, encoded. Those she could interpret were pleas for help. She tracked them back another forty-eight hours, trying to piece it all together. The hub’s rolling recorder had retained no more than that. The precise details were already lost, speeding away from her faster than she could possibly pursue. Sering’s war had broken out, though; that was all she could think. It had come and begun snuffing out colonies across human space. The lights had gone out across the solar system, as the NUNs and their allies rose up and wrestled with their enemies for the fate of mankind.

That there had been an escalation seemed incontrovertible. Kern was well aware that the governments of Earth and the colonies possessed weapons of terrifying potential, and the theoretical science existed for far worse.

The war on Earth had gone hot, that much she could tell. Neither side had backed down. Both sides had pushed and pushed, pulling new toys from the box. The beginnings of the war were lost from her two-and-half-day radio window, but she had the dreadful suspicion that the entire global conflict had lasted less than a week.

And now, twenty light years away, Earth lay silent – had lain silent for two decades. Were there people there at all? Had the entire human race been exterminated save for her, or had it simply been thrown back into a new dark age, where the dumb brute people looked up at those moving lights in the sky and forgot that their ancestors had built them.

‘The stations, the in-solar colonies… the others…’ she got out.

‘One of the last transmissions from Earth was an all-frequencies, all-directions electronic virus, Doctor,’ Eliza reported dolorously. ‘Its purpose was to infest and disable any system that received it. It appears that it was able to penetrate known security. I surmise that the various colony systems have all been shut down.’

‘But that means…’ Avrana already felt as cold as any human could have. She waited for the chill of realization, but there was none. The in-solar colonies and the handful of extra-solar bases were still being terraformed; they had been built early on in mankind’s spacegoing history, and after the technology had been developed, the extensive presence of human settlements there had slowed the process down: so many individual toes to tread on. Tabula rasa planets were so much swifter, and Kern’s World was the very first of these to be completed. Beyond Earth, mankind was terribly, terribly reliant on its technology, on its computers.

If such a virus had taken over the systems on Mars or Europa, and disabled those systems, that meant death. Swift death, cold death, airless death.

‘How did you survive then? How did we survive?’

‘Doctor, the virus was not designed to attack experimental uploaded human personality constructs. Your presence within my systems has prevented me being a suitable host for the virus.’

Avrana Kern stared past the lights of her HUD at the darkness inside the Sentry Pod, thinking about all the places in the greater dark beyond where humanity had once made a fragile, eggshell home for itself. In the end all she could think of to ask was, ‘Why did you wake me?’

‘I require you to make a Command decision, Doctor.’

‘What Command decision could you possibly need now?’ she asked the computer acidly.

‘It will be necessary for you to return to cold sleep,’ the hub told her, and now she bitterly missed the ‘…I’m afraid’, which had added a much-needed sense of human hesitancy. ‘However, a lack of information concerning current external circumstances means that I am likely to be unable to determine an appropriate trigger to reawaken you. I also believe that you yourself may not be able to instruct me concerning such a trigger, although you may give me any instructions you wish, or alternatively simply specify a particular period of time. In the alternative, you may simply rely on your personality upload to wake you at the appropriate time.’

The unspoken echo of that sounded in her mind: Or never. There may never be a time.

Show me the planet.

The great green orb that she spun about was produced for her, and all its measurements and attributes, each linking to a nested tree of additional details. Somewhere in there were the credits, the names of the dead who had designed and built each part and piece of it, who had guided its plate tectonics and sparked its weather systems into life, fast-tracked its erosion and seeded its soil with life.

But the monkeys burned. All for nothing.

It seemed impossible that she had been so close to that grand dream, the spread of life throughout the universe, the diversification of intelligence, the guaranteed survival of Earth’s legacy. And then the war came, and Sering’s idiocy, just too soon.

How long can we last? was her question.

‘Doctor, our solar arrays should enable our survival for an indefinite period of time. Although it is possible that external impact or accumulated mechanical defect may eventually result in the cessation of function, there is no known upper limit on our working lifespan.’

That had probably been intended as a pronouncement of hope. To Kern it sounded more like a prison sentence.

Let me sleep, she told the pod.

‘I require guidance on when to wake you.’

She laughed at it, the sound of her own voice hideous in the close confines. ‘When the rescue ship arrives. When the monkeys answer. When my undead uploaded self decides. Is that sufficient?’

‘I believe I can work within those tolerances, Doctor. I will now prepare you for a return to cold sleep.’

Sleep for a long, lonely time. She would return to the tomb, and a simulacrum of herself would stand watch over a silent planet, in a silent universe, as the last outpost of the great spacefaring human civilization.