Black Hull Read online

  “Mick, I don’t know what you mean, out here.”

  “Out here. Fucking space. Floating in the vacuum outside the Gliese system.”

  “Well of course I can explain my mission, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Just taking a god damned stroll through space? Sauntering about, traipsing through the Oort cloud?”

  “Your sense of humor is human.”

  “Well I’m human.”

  “Hah—ah, hah-hah!” It was a laugh, Mick realized several moments later.

  “And that’s built-in humor recognition AI.”

  “Oh dear—you were quite serious, weren’t you?”

  “About being human?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope so.”

  “I will have to check your system after I fix this.”

  “Check my system? How about you give me a blow job?”

  “I beg your pardon, Mick?”

  “Are you alright, or have you lost some circuits?”

  “I suffer from Alzeimagnetism deficiency.”

  “Alzeimagna-what?”

  “And I fear you do too, I think.”

  “Alza what?”

  “You don’t have an entry for it?”

  Mick realized what was happening. He had gone from one corrupt computer to another. Data irretrievable. Corrupt data. A circuit was not completing in this poor old thing’s brain.

  It thinks I’m a robot.

  “Do I look like a robot to you XJ?” Mick tried to dispel the droid’s suspicion. XJ finished installing the console and stood up, rotated with a creak toward his crew mate:

  “Yes, very much. But that’s an outdated term: Robot. Cellbot, you mean.”

  “Cellbot?”

  “Of course—rub it in. I know I am an older model, but that doesn’t make you any more resistant to Alzeimagnetism.”

  “What on god’s green earth is Alzeimagnetism?”

  “Mick, you are serious, aren’t you?”

  “I’m about to shut you down is how serious I am.”

  “Memory loss akin to the archaic human syndrome known as Alzheimer’s disease.”

  “Too much XJ, too much.” Mick slumped down again. He’d been pacing, staring out the porthole, expecting to see another ship arrive, come clean about the prank.

  Can I really hear this thing out? Surely I am in my death dream. I’ve frozen off this mortal coil.

  “I’ll hear you out. I’m a cellbot, you said? And we’re going to Utopia, and Earth is destroyed?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s the thirty-second century still, or has that changed too?” Mick laughed.

  Perhaps humor was what he needed. After a laugh, he could settle in, troubleshoot the cryochamber, the engine, do what he did best: get himself home.

  “Mick, I am glad I found you—Ah-hah-hah!” XJ’s eyes lit. A wisp of smoke shot toward the plasmetal ceiling from his nose. He laughed for nearly ten seconds. Mick closed his eyes; thoughts formed, condensed: one letter, another, words, sentences, phrases, concepts, ideas, patterns, intentions.

  “Ok, I give up. What year is it?”

  “Why, Mick. Don’t pretend you don’t know that time no longer passes.” XJ grew solemn, “perhaps your AM is worse than mine after all. Oh dear.”

  6

  Starlight mixed with ocher gleam in the dining room aboard the Light Dog One.

  Orange fluorescence washed over a beige table, rectangular, meant to seat six. Only two sat: XJ across from Mick. An antique clock, digital, hung above the head of the table. The walls, once bare and metal-plain, now bore the signs of dementia: The robot had decorated, it seemed, plastering archaic photos wherever there was a smooth surface. Mick strained to make out the faded images: strange singers from a bygone era, dressed in leather, above their heads a sign reading “The Cavern Club.”

  The ceiling wore several dangling earrings of tangled fish hooks, bent from wire coil and plastifiber. A radio with a half-eaten apple face sung mildly some recording from the twentieth century: “Everybody’s gree—heen, ‘cause I’m the one that won your love.” Several of the lights flickered occasionally, adding artificial despair to an otherwise blank morning. A pot of gold steamed between the droid and his new guest: roasted beans wafted in step to the radio’s throbbing rhythm. XJ’s face contorted in what was once man’s best mimesis of a smile. Mick looked at the droid, drew his cup, and sighed.

  “So it’s four thousand.”

  “That’s right Mick.”

  “And, time’s stopped?”

  “Ah-hah!” The droid gyrated, drew its own cup, and slapped the table. A line splintered at the spot where he struck.

  “You said it was. What’s to be trusted from a droid with AM?”

  “It was a joke, Mick—look.” XJ pointed to a faded photograph.

  “Einstein?”

  “Right—time is a property of matter. It was humor, to set you at ease.”

  Can I get into the computer on this thing without him bothering me? Maybe I can figure it out. I worked on LD200s. Late 200s.

  “So, how far to Utopia?”

  “Just about a year.”

  Maybe they are dead, all of them: civilization, society, war, plague, history, family, Earth. What a condensed growth in a single location. Vulnerable.

  “So my mission, it was eight hundred and fifty years ago? How do you explain that?”

  “Mick, I can’t quite explain it—it just happens to be the variance in our recollections.”

  “How’d you track down Crake?”

  “I was coasting through, on an errand before the trip to Utopia, and the explosion came through on my radar.”

  “Do you mind if I take a look at the ship’s memory?”

  “Not at all.”

  Mick drank down the last of his coffee and left the table. XJ watched him walk to the main computer and sit down.

  This is ancient. A waste of my time.

  “How do I access the time?”

  “It’s on the top right.”

  Mick’s eyes rolled. The time and date: 4,000: 12:2:19:16.1.1.

  He’s programmed his system to match his alzemangled brain. Impossible.

  The first few human instances of time-travel had been incidental. Sergei Avdeyev, a Russian cosmonaut, had flown around Earth in low-orbit for over seven hundred days, just before the close of the twentieth century. His speed in orbit had been 17,500 miles per hour, causing time for him to pass slower relative to Earth time. His feat garnered him acclaim as the first time traveler; he’d gone a full point two seconds into the future. Eventually, time travel became a luxury of the rich. Special orbiting vessels traveled swiftly around the Earth, their occupants paying in accordance with how far they wanted to travel into the future. All payments were made up front.

  Some chose to travel ten years into the future, hoping for cures to their fatal diseases in the not-so-distant future, with the idea of returning to enjoy life while their friends and family were still alive. Others paid more, longing to see the evolution of the human species. These richest of clients paid to travel up to one hundred years into the future, at the cost of only several years of their own lives.

  But eight hundred and fifty years? Even the best technology can’t produce those results. I haven’t aged a bit. All light-speed transport ships, including Black Hulls, use STEC engines: Spacetime Expansion and Contraction. STEC barely dilates the passage of time. Even if the technology does exist, there’s no way XJ’s ship is capable of it.

  “How do I access the Nav?”

  “Let me show you,” said XJ, walking over.

  The droid’s arm punched several quick commands into the keyboard. The spacetime grid of a foreign galaxy populated the screen. Beneath the image, a footer appeared: Messier 82.

  “Messier 82?”

  “Precisely. We are on course for Utopia within the Messier 82 galaxy.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “It’s quite a place Mick.
I’m glad you’ll be seeing it.”

  “I won’t be seeing it because we have to get back to Earth.”

  “Earth is gone, Mick.”

  “Bring up Earth on the Nav.”

  “If it pleases you, I’ll make an attempt.”

  XJ punched the keyboard again. The screen responded after a momentary shudder. The arms of the Milky Way Galaxy appeared. The screen zoomed in, revealing a star system with familiar planets. Mick watched the Earth come into focus, but something was wrong; it was misshapen.

  “Zoom in further.”

  It’s mangled. Devoid of blue. Without a moon. How’d he program that?

  “What is this?”

  “It’s Earth Mick. I’m sorry you are so shocked by it.”

  “How?”

  “The Moon Collision.”

  “Moon?”

  “The Quantum Bomb, Mick.”

  “Quantum bombs are illegal.”

  “Perhaps you should spend a day or two reading the Earth History Archives. They might deliver you from concern.”

  “My concern is my god damned family, you good-for-nothing piece of shit!”

  XJ recoiled, slowly backing away from Mick’s rage.

  “I am sorry you’ve been mixed up, and that you won’t see them again. I don’t know how I can help.”

  This is the death-dream. How else do you get eight hundred years into the future? I’m dying on the pod. This madness is the last firings of my neurons—a dream of impossibility and strangeness.

  Mick checked the time on the screen, looked away, closed his eyes, then checked it again.

  Same time. Dream check fail. Try again, try something else.

  Mick repeated his check, but the time on the screen stayed constant, instead of jumping about as it did in his dreams. He performed his second check: He ran to the nearest corridor, looked in, then returned to XJ. His imagination conjured a different environment. He ran back. The corridor remained the same.

  Not a dream. Not by these measures. But it has to be. What were the other dream tests?

  “Mick, it appears your AM is worsening. Why don’t you try some exercise? I can lead you to our bicycles.”

  “Okay, if it’s four thousand, humor me,” Mick began. “Have humans invented reverse time travel?”

  The laws of physics hadn’t allowed for reverse time travel. There only existed the theoretically still state of matter, its relative inertia, and the properties of matter and energy that explained motion from stillness. The four fundamental forces of nature—weak, strong, electromagnetic, and gravity—were bound to either stasis or motion. There was no recording taking place, invisibly keeping track of the prior configurations of matter in any given location. Yet Mick decided he would indulge himself in the droid’s malfunctioning mind anyway.

  “Humans haven’t existed for many years, Mick.”

  “Of course, right. And can you answer my question?”

  “Well, to be honest, there is no such thing as reverse time travel. It simply isn’t possible. Many people have written theories where mathematically it may have made some sense, but in application, it is impossible. You see, UCA law prevents—”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . .”

  XJ seemed to stop functioning. His eyes dimmed, then returned to full brightness.

  “I must remember to charge.”

  “Charge?”

  “Yes, I am not a fancy model like you Mick—I still must remember to charge. The AM makes it so hard to remember.”

  “Well, let’s get you plugged in. I need to know why it’s impossible.”

  “Right. Come this way.”

  They walked through the corridor Mick had used for his dream test, and turned abruptly into an L-shaped plastisteel chamber equipped with several reclining chairs. XJ seated himself in one and plugged a wired bracket into the side of his arm.

  “Ahhh,” he moaned.

  Mick laughed, despite the horror of his situation. The robot’s ancient AI was almost comical.

  Could I really experience this and not live to tell the story? It’s too odd, it has to be told. What a bedtime story. James always liked funny stories. Christopher went more for horror. I believe I could mix both with this one. I have a winner. There’s got to be some way back.

  The thought that there had to be a way home, no matter the odds, stuck for some strange reason in Mick’s mind. He was innately logical, yet he ignored the fact that he’d seen Earth as a cleaved half-version of itself, and that forty generations of Comptons had lived and died since his sons had been born.

  What is faith? One to ask the robot.

  “So why is reverse time travel impossible?”

  “It was the regulation: Quantum Energy Regulation forty-seven point eight.”

  “Regulation?”

  “An amendment stemming from the abuse of quantum technology. The proliferation of quantum near-field manipulation drastically increased in twenty-five hundred. UCA law prohibited certain quantum technology. Among the prohibitions: any further use of quantum technology to develop reverse time travel.”

  “So it was physically possible?”

  “I don’t know if physically is the right word. But yes, it was achieved.”

  “So no outlaws have built a reverse time travel machine in five hundred years?”

  “Mick you must read the Histories, as I said. You will be far happier than with my fallible explanations. Would you like to play chess?”

  A cold spirit of emptiness filled Mick. The contradiction of his reality resisted all penetration. Nothing made sense.

  7

  Knight to E5.

  “That’s not a good move Mick,” said XJ.

  Months had passed since the rescue. XJ wandered about the ship, never resting, always tinkering with one component or another. His supposed AM seemed to have dwindled, for he was as clever and sharp-witted as ever. Often he would try to cheer Mick, sensing his depression, with rude jokes about the cruel irony of fate, which he called a construct that only robots, their kind, could understand.

  XJ had continued to insist that Mick was also a robot, and that humans had become extinct. Mick read a great deal of the ship’s Earth History Archive, only to find that XJ’s AM truly had skewed the memory banks of the old droid: humans hadn’t died off, as XJ suggested, but simply emigrated to Mars. The Compton line could very well be alive there.

  During one frustrating evening, Mick had cut his arm to show XJ the blood. For a time, XJ believed that Mick really was a human. Mick had shown XJ the archives detailing the emigration of the UCA to Mars. For a time, XJ seemed to recognize that humans were still alive. But as the days wore on, Mick saw that memory retention was XJ’s primary weakness. His strength was the Light Dog One. It was as if his ancient memory of how to run the old ship never eroded. XJ worked the ship with unceasing vigilance, monitoring all its systems, ever fine-tuning its course to reach the first system he planned to stop at on the way to Utopia: Bessel 2. Apparently, XJ had a friend, another robot, who’d be waiting for him there.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” XJ cautioned. Mick moved his queen out anyway.

  “I read this morning about the unknown object detected in April, twenty ten.”

  “In M82 you mean?”

  “Yea.”

  “You know what it was?”

  “According to your archives, it hasn’t been identified. A hundred years after it was discovered, microquasar was ruled out. A mysterious radio signal travelling four times the speed of light. Nothing is logged in the system to explain it.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you about it. The discovery occurred after the ship’s last archive update.”

  XJ moved his knight, creating a fork that attacked Mick’s queen and king simultaneously.

  “Shit…”

  “Typical. Older model droids are said to play better. Perhaps that’s why you continue to lose. Newer model cellbots such as yourself are more and more out of touch with pure binary logic, no of
fense. They have lost that fine touch of objective reasoning, relying too much on the human quality of deceptiveness.” Mick moved his king, lost his queen.

  “So the discovery, the unknown emission of radiowaves—what was it?”

  “Utopia.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I am right. The signal was a code. Something meant for humans to decipher, a present of their own creation. A true gift.”

  “You’ve told me before. The place is wonderful, I get it.”

  “Using time travel, humans sent sentient droids ahead, carved this world out. Then, they sent the signal back to the adolescent Earth. It makes very simple sense.”

  “And this place will be filled with droids?”

  “I think it will be. Remember Mick, I have never been there either.”

  XJ had remembered his mission shortly after Mick’s rescue: He’d been sent out to inspect an anomalous energy signal near Bessel 2. It turned out that the anomaly had been the explosion of the Crake. Somehow, the Gliese system had bled into M82. It happens, XJ had explained. How, Mick had asked. Call it tempospacial littering, XJ had replied. Makes perfect AM sense.

  “On Utopia there are cures for AM. I think so, anyway,” XJ said. “Check.”

  “Shit—you have me.” Mick looked into the droid’s eyes. “Any chance they have reverse time travel for me?”

  “I don’t think so Mick, but what do I know? I’m very old. I don’t feel quite like myself anymore.”