Noumenon Infinity Read online

  They were hoping to find something important to the Nataré here (Nataré was what they’d named the Nest’s creators, from the Latin, for how they were believed to be able to “float” or “swim” through the air on their biologically manipulated gravitons). Anything would do really. If all they stumbled upon was a set of tentacle prints and a patch of “we were here” graffiti, she’d take it.

  Because that would silence the doubt.

  When the convoy had successfully developed the technology to access the Nest’s computer, they’d soon come to the conclusion that the ship was more like a shuttle. Which made sense, given its size. Unless, of course, the aliens were considerably smaller than humans; just one of the many things Caznal was hoping to learn. She was still surprised they didn’t even know something that basic about them.

  The ship’s computer contained no visuals of the aliens, nor any general historical data. All they found were three-dimensional representations of hundreds of spheres stuffed full with additional spheres of different sizes.

  At first, the engineers had thought they’d stumbled upon the Nataré writing system, that each parent sphere could denote a page or even an entire document, and the spheres inside were words. But running them through a rudimentary algorithm revealed a lack of repetition, a fundamental requirement for ordering anything—sounds, symbols, movements—into meaningful communication.

  It took them years to mentally convert the Nest’s data into information more suited to a human thinking process. The breakthrough had come when they found spheres with only a couple of—and in some cases, only one—interior spheres. When these were matched to full-to-the-brim spheres, they found an overlap. The mostly empty spheres appeared to highlight points in the full spheres.

  X-marks the spot.

  On human maps, the distance between objects was the focal point; the primary information the map was intended to convey. Objects were usually portrayed as a similar size—a single point at large scales. Not so with the alien maps. The Nataré highlighted gravitational influence over all other possible associations. According to the convoy’s best theories, their evolution had clearly influenced the way they saw and interacted with the world.

  After recognizing the spheres as maps, their research became a quick spiral of realization and discovery. The spheres represented different sizes of gravitational influence created by various cosmological objects, and though they were shown with no distance between them, they were ordered in accordance with their spatial relation.

  All the humans had to do then was take their current gravitational models and overlay them with the Nataré maps.

  When they found one nearly empty sphere that highlighted LQ Pyxidis and a handful of other points, they knew they’d struck gold. It was the smoking gun they’d been looking for, evidence linking the Nest and the Web to new locations: places where more Nataré history, or the Nataré themselves, might be found.

  Places like this planemo.

  Only . . .

  The ground rushed up at them—though their rate of descent slowed for landing, Caz still felt a jolt in her bones when they touched down.

  “Ready, sir?” Ivan asked, giving her the thumbs-up.

  “Ready,” she breathed, standing. When the pilot gave the green light, she hoisted the duffel bag of tools that lay at her feet onto her shoulder, as did her colleagues.

  “Four hours for setup,” the pilot reminded them. “Half an hour for return. Stay in visual range of your assigned teammates at all times. And Captain Nwosu would like to remind you that if it wiggles, don’t touch it. If everyone’s got that, I’m opening the doors.”

  A series of thumbs-ups and affirmations over comms led to the locks and their airtight seals disengaging, shifting aside to reveal the open plane and perpetual night of the crater floor.

  Since Caznal was the head of the Nataré division, everyone waited for her cue. She would have the honor of stepping on this alien world first.

  Hopefully, though, I won’t be the first sentient to explore this surface.

  The planemo was roughly the size and density of Mars, with a surface of mostly ice, so Caz knew to expect a lower gravitational pull. It was still strange to feel the burden of her bag lighten and the tension of her muscles ease as she disembarked. The artificial gravity on the convoy ships—even the shuttles—was a constant one-g, and though they’d learned from Earth to make gravity cyclers smaller, allowing for more acute graviton manipulation, they had yet to finesse the tech into spacesuits.

  Though she could move easily in the lower gravity, she felt unsteady. Like she was walking on a wobbly gelatin surface instead of solid rock. But the cleats on her soles held true to the frozen landscape, and her confidence increased with each stride.

  The darkness, she found, was both a frustration and a godsend. Though the lights on her suit barely illuminated the craggy surface three feet in front of her, the small sphere of light felt safe.

  She’d heard stories about planet sickness—the agoraphobia-related illness many of the crew members had experienced when the convoy had revisited Earth—and she had absolutely no desire to experience it firsthand.

  “Say something,” Ivan prompted when she’d shambled a few yards away from the shuttle.

  Turning back, she realized no one was following her. But eight helmets—the glare from their mounted headlamps obscuring their faces—peered out from the craft’s opening.

  “Do we have to say something profound every time we step on new rocks?” she asked.

  “Really?” Aziz, whose background was in bioengineering, called. “Really?”

  “Oh, come on,” Caz said. “That’s gonna look way better in the history books than ‘one small step.’ Schoolkids love sarcasm.”

  “We all hate you right now,” Aziz said, pushing past the others to jump through the hatch. The rest of them clambered out in sequence, looking a bit like a set of robots in their uniformity. Very similar, in fact, to the autons stored in the shuttle’s hold, which Caz would call to her aid once the locations for their gear were set.

  They wouldn’t have cared what I said. She smiled as she watched the team quickly fan out in sets of three, carrying their equipment with ease.

  Even though the labor was light, Caz could still hear her breath reverberating through her helmet, which added to the being-in-a-bubble sensation.

  They’d picked Crater Sixty-four as a landing site because it was so unlike most of the planemo’s other craters, which were clearly created by impact. Their radar-mapping flybys hadn’t revealed any overt signs of civilization, past or present. No sprawling cities, no orbiting satellites, no bizarre megastructures. Not even a Cydonian Face to set pareidolia working, or a prominent mimetolith worth speculating about. Just a uniform frozenness, covered over with the dust of impact after impact.

  But here, under the gray-green debris and the superficial indentations left by meteorites, the crater’s rim looked worked, scarred and terraced like in a quarry, disturbed by hand-equivalents with sentient intent.

  But perhaps it was natural. Perhaps they would find no sign the Nataré had ever been here, no discernible Web-related reason for it to be on their map. No one in their division dared voice such a possibility, though surely everyone was thinking it. If they couldn’t tie this planemo to the Nest, then their detour from the Web would be for naught; a waste of time.

  It was an outcome Caznal had feared ever since they’d emerged from SD travel, still light-years away, to do a gravitational survey in order to make sure they were on the right track. Everything had lined up relatively well—putting all the gravitational influences almost exactly where the Nataré data put them, accounting for the millennia that had passed since the Nest had been abandoned inside the Web—everything except their destination. Their treasure map’s X, the Cave of Wonders, did not have the gravitational influence the map insisted it should.

  There should have been, at a minimum, a star system. But all they’d found was this small wanderin
g rock.

  How could that be? Had a collision or some other calamity displaced the mass the Nataré had noted? Did it mark something unnatural? A fleet of alien ships? The fleet the Nest had once belonged to, that had long ago vacated the parsec?

  And if the map had meant to point to something other than the planemo, then that meant their time here would amount to little more than a geological side-trek, and the surface beneath her feet was of no more importance than any other. Nothing but a cold rock. Inconsequential. A cosmic red herring, steering them away from their true purpose.

  What did that make her career, her department? Misguided? Overblown?

  She remembered stories about Earth scientists losing all their funding and credibility in the search for Atlantis. There were even crackpots who’d said the Atlanteans were still alive, just hiding.

  That wasn’t what she’d been doing all these years, was it? Searching for Atlanteans?

  “Here looks like a good spot for the first post,” Aziz said, waving Ivan over.

  They were triangulating spotlights this go-around, and setting up the perimeters of their dig site. They’d become exoarchaeologists soon—using ground-penetrating radar to check for buried evidence, shoveling aside layers of dirt and stone and ice not touched by so much as a breeze in this perpetually frozen nightland.

  It wasn’t a job they were meant for, not in the same way other clones were destined for their positions after the DNA reevaluations on Earth, before Infinitum’s inception. Theirs was a small, hodgepodge group. Originally, study of the Nest and its contents had fallen solely to the engineers, but, in time, it became clear the convoy required a new department, one focused on the creatures, full of people who could decode the fundamentals of Nataré culture, biology, and data.

  Clones had been siphoned from bioengineering positions, which included medical staff and food processing staff. Communications had given up a line or three, as had computing, education, and SD drive maintenance. And, of course, Caznal’s line had been taken from engineering.

  Now, the copper-colored jumpsuits of the Nataré scholars were one of the rarest uniforms among the crew, second only to the server caretakers’ sand color on Hvmnd. They wore it as a point of pride. Caznal saw it as a symbol of evolution: the evolution of purpose, of understanding, of their focus and dedication.

  When each of the three teams was set, Caz activated her puppeteer implants, calling to the autons.

  Three of the robots emerged from the shuttle’s storage hatch, unfolding from their compact travel positions, with legs slung over their own dislocated shoulders. The autons were an Earth invention, humanoid in form, dexterous in movement, with tensile strength and lifting power far beyond any machine in existence when the convoy was first launched.

  Caz couldn’t see them at this range, but she could see through their “eyes,” and they could sense the weak infrared signatures emanating from the humans. She directed one to aid each set of three.

  They relied entirely on her instruction, with no will or executable programs of their own. Each auton’s sleek black helmet of a head contained an active neural network, which her implants communicated with. Theirs was a hybrid of human and elephant brain tissue, without its own sentience, but with the speed and nuance only biological computing was capable of.

  Scratch that. I.C.C. could match brain banks for reasoning, intelligence, and empathy any day of the week. It was the only truly artificial intelligence currently known to humanity.

  But I.C.C. was confined to its body—the convoy. It was of no help down here. Especially with no hands of its own.

  She used the autons to work in mirrored tandem, each coring a hole for, and setting up, the spotlight poles. While she directed their labor, others packed up the core samples for testing on Holwarda, and drew a detailed guide-grid for the area.

  Few people in the convoy currently knew how to manipulate the autons—especially with her level of skill. The robots weren’t needed on a daily basis, so most of the artificial forms were held in reserve on Bottomless II, with appropriate neural networks being cloned only a handful at a time. Eventually the time of the autons would come, when the convoy was ready to set to work on their Dyson Sphere, but for now, most remained on lockdown.

  “Ready to start mapping the grid area,” Ivan announced when Caz was nearly done with the hard labor.

  “Everything calibrated?” she asked.

  “All’s a go, sir.”

  “Then have at ’er.”

  The last thing Caz would have to hook up was the generator. She retrieved it with the puppets, as Ivan and Aziz made a slow, straight path across the ice. The Nataré team had picked a two-by-two acre area as their starting point. On the next away mission they’d bring down more of their colleagues, who’d expand the perimeter while they got to work on the first dig site—provided the GPR found anything worth digging up.

  “Okay everybody,” she called when her work was done. “Floodlights coming on in three, two, one.”

  As the lights snapped on, revealing the glittering fractures in the debris-covered ice, her teammates took turns crying out theatrically at the loss of their night vision.

  “Yeah, yeah, all right,” she laughed. “My eyes! The goggles do nothing!” She started to send the autons back—their job complete—when one caught a faint glint in the distance. It was a reflection too dim for human eyes to catch, brassy in color—very unlike the glimmer dancing off the ice.

  Without a word, she sent the single auton to investigate. It bounded over the surface, sliding a little as it met the downward slope of a small crater, shards of stone tumbling around its mechanical feet. Then it was up the other side, and Caz focused one of its external lights on the curious spot.

  It was definitely metallic, jutting up from the slight rim at an outward angle. It extended maybe a foot above the surface, perhaps the result of the impact itself—ore melting under the heat of friction, splashing upward and then cooling quickly as it encountered the frigidness of space. There were similar nodules around its base, all angled, these no more than a few centimeters in height.

  But as the auton came upon them, she realized the cylindrical, if nonuniform, shape was familiar.

  Could it—?

  She hadn’t let herself hope—still didn’t want to. Fighting the thrill of anticipation, she ignored the weakness in her knees and tried to still her heart as it fluttered wildly.

  It could be nothing. It’s probably nothing, she told herself as she jogged in the auton’s direction, only to settle into a walk. It took a lot of willpower to force herself to move slowly, deliberately attempting to look unbothered. No use drawing the others’ attention. Not unless it turned out to be something worth the diversion.

  But Ivan noticed her shifting attention, saw her initial run off into the night.

  “Sir?” he asked, pausing his trudge behind the GPR skiff as she moved past him.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Caz?” Aziz prompted. “Caznal, what—?”

  The breathy echo in her helmet grew louder as she directed the auton to dig. She had to see, had to know right now.

  The robot thrust its fingertips into the ice, smashing the frozen surface. It scraped away pummeled debris from the object’s sides, slowly revealing more of the same.

  Leaving the newly illuminated dig site felt like stepping off a cliff. Now, instead of comforting, her small halo of light felt claustrophobic, restraining. As though it kept her hemmed in from the planemo’s secrets on purpose.

  She tripped over herself on her way to the auton’s side—it was difficult trying to mentally maneuver the puppet’s limbs contradictory to her own—and the shouts of her name over the comms system became more frantic.

  “I’m fine!” she said, though it appeased no one. Both their concern and curiosity had been piqued, if the continued comms chatter was anything to go on.

  By the time she reached the robot, it had loosened the ground around the primary object, plus the fiv
e nodes nearest. She fell to her knees, joining it, scraping aside what she could with her clumsy, gloved hands.

  Something in the back of her mind perked, and she realized it was dangerous to test her suit this way. What if she dug down to something sharp and punctured her glove? She could lose pressure, or worse—just because the planet was cold, that didn’t mean it was barren. There could be dormant microbes beneath the surface, just waiting to encounter a carbon-based life-form.

  Though the thought gave her momentary pause, she kept digging. She knew it was irrational, that she should approach this like the tempered scientist she was, and yet the excitement was overwhelming.

  And now, close up, she was sure: this oddly formed metal was the spitting image of the Nest’s outer piping, Nataré technology used in their graviton supercycler. Only this seemed to be inverted. Where the Nest’s cycler dangled beneath the ship, this thrust upward, like the prongs of winter branches.

  “Over here!” she cried at last, the dam of self-restraint no longer bowing under her exhilaration, but breaking. “I found something! Bring the GPR!”

  I found them, she said to herself. I found the Atlanteans.

  Ground-Penetrating Radar revealed at least three other supercycler tree structures near the surface, plus a few odd shapes of peculiar density that could be—based on their uniformity—buildings.

  They still had to adhere to their four-and-a-half-hour ground schedule, but when they got back to the shuttle, there was much whooping and hollering, and a promise from the pilot to treat them all to an allowance of her special home brew from modified barley.

  Ivan forgot himself for a moment and nearly whisked off his helmet after take-off. Only Aziz catching his hands and whacking him on the top of the thing saved him from an arduous level of extra decontamination when they docked with Hippocrates.

  Even the scrubbers and the doctors gave them all hearty congratulations. And while Caz was still excited, she was far more subdued. Introspective.

  Because the initial thrill of discovery had worn off, her adrenaline had ebbed. The careful thought she should have applied prior to running off into the night now occupied her every moment.