The Life Engineered (4 page)

“What the—?” I started complaining.

Before I could complete my thought, however, an enormous chunk of rock and metal zoomed out of the black sky and slammed into Midgard’s surface. Without an atmosphere to provide friction or sufficient light to illuminate it, the enormous projectile came out of nowhere. Without air to carry noise, it descended silently at several times the speed of sound, crashing near the base of the tower.

The impact threw the ruined structure to the sky, breaking it apart in the process. Thousands of pieces of metal, pseudoplastic, and other hypermaterials were launched upward, my brand-new body amongst them.

I held on tight to the Nursery’s mnemonic core as I flew skyward at speeds I’d never imagined I could reach. Apart from the vibrations created by the occasional debris that crashed into me, the whole cataclysmic event happened in perfect silence.

After a few minutes of flying toward the great black vacuum, the cloud of tower fragments I was a part of spread sufficiently so I could get a better look at my situation. Below me, I could see the rapidly receding surface of Midgard. An immense glowing crater had replaced the area where Yggdrassil had been located. Looking around, I could see why Skinfaxi had chosen not to descend upon the moon’s surface. Thousands of meteors of various sizes were raining down upon the surface of Midgard. In less than an hour, most of these high-velocity projectiles would become craters, forever altering the topography of my birth world.

Then I saw it.

Amongst the incoming shards of rock, like a whale hidden in a school of fish, a titanic meteor several kilometers wide was making its way to Midgard. Everything else, including the monster that had propelled me off the surface, was just a preamble, the entourage of the real behemoth whose destiny was to destroy the moon.

Once this leviathan hit, nothing would be left of Midgard but a slowly expanding debris field.

“How are you doing out there, little buddy?” Skinfaxi’s voice cut through my thoughts.

“I won’t lie; I’m a little terrified.”

“Ho-ho! Have no fear, friend! I’m on my way.”

I looked around and, sure enough, in the distance I could see the telltale gleam of an artificial construct. I zoomed in with my optics to get a better look at his ship. The vessel was large enough, at a respectable twenty meters wide. Its shape reminded me of a crab’s shell. I couldn’t see any view port or windows. There were devices, engines, and drives, I assumed, attached to the top and back of the ship that I couldn’t identify, though a pair of large ion thrusters was in evidence.

It took a while for Skinfaxi to arrive at my position. Meanwhile, I looked through my limited data banks to understand this “coincidence” he’d mentioned earlier. “The bright-maned horse Skinfaxi, who draws day to mankind.” Day, or in Norse, Dagr. “What’s with the Norse obsession?” I asked.

“Capek genealogy,” Skinfaxi explained as he brought his ship closer. The vessel had elegant lines for such a sturdy design. In fact, the surface of it looked almost delicate, with a thick layer of semitranslucent pseudo-plastic over a shell of gleaming metal. Underneath the ship a round platform slid down to reveal an opening. Using my maneuvering thrusters, I made my way inside the large spacecraft.

“Gaia-class Capeks, such as Yggdrassil, were named after various myths and religions,” he continued as I looked around the ship. “Offspring names are taken from the same stories in order to trace lineage. They don’t mean anything as far as I can tell, though you do run across interesting coincidences at times.”

There was no artificial gravity by way of rotation or magnetic plates in the floor of the ship. In fact, there were no identifiable floors or ceilings. No ups or downs. Just a length of circular corridor roughly two meters wide covered in ribbing that served as handholds for passengers to move around the vessel interior, intersected by a couple of other corridors farther towards the front.

“Follow the lights to the bridge.”

I followed his instruction, pushing myself in the direction of a set of small blinking lights embedded into the corridor.

There was a distinct lack of intersections and other corridors between the entrance hatch and the bridge. Just one uninterrupted corridor. There seemed to be irregularities in the surface of the passage that might have been doors or perhaps access panels for maintenance.

The bridge itself was an oddity. The room was spherical. A large viewing screen took up most of the front portion of the room. There were no chairs and no terminals. Save for the outline of smaller monitors on the side of the room, the walls were perfectly smooth. It was a relatively small area, five meters in diameter. The large screen displayed Midgard, obscured by a cloud of slowly expanding reddish-brown dust. I could see the larger meteor, moments from plunging into the cloud to deliver the deathblow.

“I call it Ragnarok,” Skinfaxi said without showing himself. “I’m moving us away from it. The impact is going to be incredible.”

I stopped looking around for the pilot and stared at the screen. For a while nothing happened. Dust kept billowing, and more meteors kept disappearing in the cloud. Then there was a brief flash of light. Within seconds the dust cloud was blown out as large chunks of the moon were thrown in almost every direction. More dust bubbled out of the impact site at incredible speeds. Midgard didn’t so much explode as disintegrate, like a sandcastle hit by a wave in the rising tide. Most of the larger pieces of the moon kept up with the momentum and direction of Ragnarok, but several chunks, some kilometers in width, sped in our general direction.

“Okay. We’re out of here,” Skinfaxi declared with relative calm, still from apparently nowhere.

The image on the monitor rotated from the planet, giving me a dazzling view of the gas giant Asgard before pointing toward open space. The stars blinked for a second, and the ship rotated back, Ragnarok now a small, bright crescent in the darkness, and the remains of Midgard barely visible despite my advanced optics.

I stared in silence. I interrogated my internal equipment and found I had officially been online, out of the Nursery, and into this body for a little over two hours. I had seen meteors ravage a space station, traveled to space, boarded a spacecraft, and witnessed the destruction of a moon.

“Is the life of a Capek always this exciting?”

“Oh-oh! You haven’t seen anything yet.”

I floated around the bridge for a few more minutes, digesting what I had gone through and twisting the mnemonic core in my hands. The cylinder of melted metal and pulled wires housed a self-sustaining memory loop. The impossibly complex information that represented a whole world’s history, with billions of individual personalities, was stored in this tiny electronic miracle. Without the processing power to animate the artificial world within, the core had settled into a repeating pattern that refreshed the information inside at a very low energy cost. The internal battery, assuming it was in good condition, would keep this virtual universe frozen in time for over a century.

I became restless waiting for my host to show himself. I hesitantly began to prune the loose wiring and burnt plastic from the mnemonic core for a moment before losing patience.

“Skinfaxi?” I asked, trying to mask my irritation.

“Mmmh?” the voice came back, still omnidirectional. Still disembodied.

“Where are you?”

My host remained silent for a moment before answering with a question of his own.

“You mean, where’s my body?”

“I guess so.”

“Ha-ha! You’re floating in it.”

I looked around me at the sphere that was the bridge, wondering if he meant this room or . . .

“I am this ship. A Sputnik-class Capek. I was born and built in the very same hangar where you awakened. Did you think a facility that size was meant to build meter-tall humanoids?”

The hangar had been over a quarter of a kilometer in length. Even Skinfaxi would have been tiny inside such a structure. What kind of Capeks had Yggdrassil been capable of building?

“Doesn’t that make interacting with humanoids more difficult? What about doing things planet side?”

“Not everyone is interested in doing surface things. Sputniks tend to like swimming amongst the stars. Though I can always use a remote telepresence drone to interact with my smaller peers, but I’m almost out of those. I was hoping to get more from Yggdrassil.”

Yggdrassil. The elephant in the room. If I understood him correctly, he and I were siblings in a fashion. We’d both lost a parent in a way, though not really. I wasn’t close to the artificial intelligence that had spawned me, yet I felt a hint of loss. How did he feel?

“What happened back there? How does something like Yggdrassil get surprised by a meteor shower?” Judging by the level of technology that went into constructing my body, I could only imagine the vast technical resources available to the Capek race. How could they allow such a catastrophe to just happen?

“I’m not sure. I was originally summoned by Yggdrassil to pick you up. Show you around, bring you to the City so you could start finding your way. That’s going to have to wait a little now. Want to know where those rocks came from?”

“Yes.” I wanted an answer, and in a way I got one, but it wasn’t what I expected.

“So do I.” His voice had taken an ominous if a little amused tone. He might as well have been saying Get a load of this as he spoke.

Skinfaxi had good reason to think I’d be impressed. Through the front monitor I saw that he was adjusting headings. Once he’d stabilized our direction, the stars becoming immobile after a change of pitch and yaw, I heard the buildup of a high-pitched hum emanating from the back of the ship.

“Hold on,” he warned.

As a first-time space traveler, I didn’t quite know what to expect. His warning led me to think that whatever was building up would cause a tremendous disturbance, perhaps throwing me to the back of the spherical room or interfering with my sensors in an unpleasant way. I tried to pull up information on space travel but could only fish out technical manuals on the various kinds of long-range propulsion and space-distortion engines, and how to repair and maintain them. Nothing about their potential effect on a passenger. Before I could sift through it all, the crescendo reached its highest pitch and went silent. Then the stars danced.

Actually, they wiggled, as if space were reflected on a still lake that was suddenly disturbed. When the heavens finally settled, I noticed that the lights that populated the sky around us were moving. Or rather, we were moving. Judging by the stars’ shifting, we were traveling at speeds that were literally—or rather, mathematically—impossible.

“How fast are we going?” I asked while floating closer to the monitor in awe.

“C3.6 and rising.”

“That’s impossible,” I gushed in wonderment.

“Ha-ha! Actually, you’re right,” he explained. “We aren’t technically moving, but we are in a bubble of space that is. Since the bubble has zero mass, it isn’t limited to relativistic speeds.”

“An Alcubierre drive?” It made sense now. A quick scan of my library found three types of faster-than-light drives, and this one matched Skinfaxi’s description closest.

“A variation of it, yes. The energy requirements are magnitudes lower.”

I wasn’t that technically minded. Yet I suddenly found myself fascinated by the technology I was witnessing. This scientific miracle wasn’t just an incredible tool available to Skinfaxi; it was a part of him as much as legs were a part of me. What was a violation of the traditional laws of physics was a simple means of locomotion to him.

“Where are we going?”

“While I was on my way to retrieve you from your little high-altitude trip, I calculated the origin of the meteor that destroyed Yggdrassil. A cursory spectrographic survey told me that Ragnarok had originally been a single chunk of rock that had broken apart during travel. A little reverse navigation and I found that it had come from . . .”

The stars suddenly stopped moving with another odd rippling. Skinfaxi came to a complete stop, and on-screen I could see a perfect circle of absolute darkness. Or rather, a circular area through which I could see no stars.

“. . . here.”

“What is that?” My initial thought was that it must be a black hole, but further reflection made me realize that light wasn’t being distorted around the phenomenon, nor was there any change in gravity. The object, if it could be called such, was roughly three kilometers across but had, to my limited perception, no mass at all.

“A collapsor point. The front door of a wormhole.”

“So Ragnarok came though this and coincidentally ran into Midgard?”

“Hmph! Not coincidentally, but yes. I think the meteor was sent from somewhere with the specific goal of destroying Yggdrassil.”

“That’s insane! Why would anyone attack Yggdrassil? Wouldn’t she have told me if she had enemies? Especially if it meant I’d be dodging meteors within minutes.”

“Who knows? It doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t know of anyone who would wish harm on one of the Gaias, and there’s no reason to think Yggdrassil believed any different. She might have assumed it was just catastrophic bad luck. But in my humble opinion that meteor couldn’t have made it to Midgard without someone carefully orchestrating its trajectory, especially with the proximity of Asgard. The gas giant should have pulled that rock before it even got close to Midgard.”

“Could it have been aliens?” I asked. While Skinfaxi had explained his reasoning, I had looked up if our civilization had contact with nonhuman life-forms, but nothing had come up.

“It’s not completely impossible, but too implausible. There are billions of stars in the galaxy, but we’ve done a good job cataloguing the vast majority. Especially the really interesting ones. Fermi’s paradox holds true: if there were a civilization out there capable of lobbing asteroids through wormholes, we’d have seen signs by now.

“One of us used this wormhole to toss a stone at Yggdrassil.”

There was an interesting spark of fire in Skinfaxi’s tone. So far I’d seen him dodging away from a collapsing moon with a detached sense of humor. While I couldn’t claim to know this Capek very well, I was surprised by the edge in his voice.