Children of Time (3 page)

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.