Communion of Dreams, page 1
Published by Artifact Imprints
Kindle and Amazon CreateSpace versions first printed
in the United States of America, January 2012.
Copyright © James T. Downey
2012
All rights reserved.
Cover photograph © Peter Haigh
Used by permission
Cover design by Martha John
ISBN-13: 978-061559044-8
ISBN-10: 061559044-6
Artifact Imprints
Dedication:
For Alix, who never lost faith that this book would touch others.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Communion of Dreams was long in finally coming to print, and along the way I had a lot of help and feedback from friends and family.
First and foremost, thanks to my wife Martha. Not just for putting up with my occasional obsession in working on this book and the crazy Paint The Moon spin-off project it inspired. But also for giving me the emotional and financial stability to deal with the many rejections and false starts, and for being my technical support staff in all the myriad ways necessary.
And thanks to my friends who provided honest feedback as I worked on the book, who gave me encouragement and sometimes bad news that I needed to hear — you helped me create a much better story, and deserve credit for the good parts (without blame for the less good parts). Since it has been such a long haul, there’s no way I can remember all the contributions or rank their relative value, so I’m just going to list everyone alphabetically (and hope against hope that I don’t leave someone out): Craig Brown, Sheron Buchele Rowland, Sue Clotfelter, Danielle Eldred, Jon Greising, Margo Lynn Hablutzel, Shawna Johnson, Jim Kasper, Jerry Lintz, Jim McAdams, Wendy Robertson, Blake Rogers, Ken Sibley, Paul Stuve, Steve Tuck, Tim Weitzel, Annie Wilcox, Scot Wilcox, Celeste Zink.
Lastly, thanks to the thousands who downloaded this book from my website and told others about it, who have left comments on my blogs and sent me notes over the years. You helped convince me to stick with this project during the long delays when it almost went to print previously.
— Jim Downey
Chapter 1
He could see four or five thousand buffalo, one of the small herds. They stretched out in a long line below him, wide enough to fill the shallow valley along this side of the river, coming partway up the sides of the hill, not fifty meters from where he stood. The sky was its perpetual blue-grey, as clear as it ever got at this latitude, though the sun was almost bright. Late winter snow, churned into a dull brown mass by the buffalo where they trekked along the valley floor, nonetheless glinted along the tops of the hills. Weather forecasts said more snow was coming. It was Friday, April 12.
He leaned on the railing, looking down, the windows of the research station behind him. He liked the solitude of the open sky of the National Buffalo Commons. Though he had many painful memories associated with these plains, they could fill the void inside him in a way that no place else could. He had grown up not too far away, back when people used to live out here. Now there were only the stations — small shelters where scientists could study the herds as they migrated, or where people with enough connections could escape for a few days.
The Commons had been borne of the fire-flu, with so few people left out in the great northern plains after it was finally all over that it was a relatively simple matter to just turn things back over to nature. Effectively, that happened a few short years after the flu swept around the globe. According to law, it was codified almost a decade later in the late Twenties, after the Restoration was complete and the country was once again whole — expanded, actually, to include what had been Canada, minus independent Quebec. Hard to believe that was more than twenty years ago.
>click
>click
With a slight sigh, he lightly pressed the small wafer under the skin between his left ear and jaw. He spoke out loud, though his voice was just above a whisper. “What do you want, Seth?”
“Sorry to bother you, Jon, but you’ll need to come back immediately. Business. I’ve made the arrangements. Transport waiting for you in town, take you to Denver. Then commercial flight home.” Audio only. That meant a lot. Tighter beam, easier to encode and keep private. Security protocol.
He wondered if something had gone wrong with the Hawking, the experimental long-range ship undergoing trials, based out at Titan. That was about the only thing he could think of that would require his cutting short his first vacation in four years. No use in asking. “All right. Give me a few minutes to pack my things, and I’ll get started.”
“Understood.”
“And contact my family, let them know I’m on my way back. ”
“Will do. Anything else?”
“Not at present. See you when I get there.”
>click
He paused there at the railing, right hand manipulating the thin-film controls under the skin on the back of his left hand. Looking out over the herd of slowly moving animals, a see-through display came up before him. Nothing new on the nets. So, whatever the emergency was, it wasn’t public knowledge yet. He turned, opened the door to the station, and stepped inside. Gathering his things, he powered-down the station and went out to the snow skimmer.
* * *
At the airport he picked up the local net, found his ‘transport’: an ancient 787 on a cargo run. The human pilot was waiting for him inside the jet, a young woman of vaguely Asian heritage.
“Hi. Have a seat while I finish here.” She gestured at the seat beside her in the cockpit. Jon stuck his bag in the bin behind them, settled into the seat, strapped in. Most of the instruments looked like they still worked, though labels were worn bare and screens were scratched and dusty.
She sat relaxed in her chair, looking at nothing he could see, left hand playing across the back of the right. Occasionally she said a word or two in a low voice, not bothering to cover her mouth for privacy. After a moment she looked over at him, swivelled her seat a bit to face him. “Sorry, needed to check some things with the expert for this jet. Kind of a slow-witted creature, just an M-series.” She stuck out a hand, “Name’s Amy Fisher.”
Jon reached out and shook hands with her. When their hands touched, the palmkeys exchanged the usual ‘business card’ information, but out of politeness he said, “Jon Thompson. Glad I have someone to talk with on this trip.”
“Likewise.” The engines fired up, the jet started moving toward the runway. She didn’t look away from him, though for a moment her attention was diverted. As the plane turned onto the runway, built speed toward takeoff, she focused on him again, “Settlement Authority, eh? I wondered who was behind this. I never have passengers.”
“Yeah, something came up, so they booked me on the first plane out.”
“Not a problem.” She was more curious than suspicious. In this era of extreme decentralization and individualism, the USSA was one of the few exceptions to the almost complete lack of a federal government. The Settlement Authority had responsibility for American efforts in space, beyond the normal commercial traffic around Earth. It coordinated with the Europeans and the Japanese in their spheres of influence, and helped everyone get along with the Israeli settlements on the Moon.
“Your intro says ‘Outer System Admin’. Like Titan and Europa?”
“Yeah. Primarily Titan, though the combined settlement on Europa is also nominally under my jurisdiction.”
“Huh.” She paused, glancing at something only she could see. It didn’t seem to concern her. “So, don’t mean to pry, but what do you do?”
“Mostly coordinate resources, make sure that the people and things which are needed for the different facilities are available.”
“Been out there?”
“Low orbit quite a few times, since all of our teams depart from the stations after collecting the personnel and equipment they need. Mars and the Moon a couple of times. Titan Prime and Europa once each. How about you?”
“Yeah, I have relatives on Mars. Been there. They tried to convince me to stay, but I don’t really have any skills necessary for it, and the whole Japanese ‘group’ thing isn’t for me.”
“Understood.” The Japanese settlement of Mars was proceeding apace. It wasn’t so much settlement as an actual attempt to terraform the planet, one small piece at a time, starting near the South pole and moving outward in a spiral pattern of hexagonal cells. They were, in essence, enclosing the entire planet in a greenhouse of glass fabric and golden plasteel. It was going to take generations to finish, even using mass microbots and fabricating the construction materials from the Martian sands. Tens of thousands of the specially programmed microbots, a few centimeters long and a couple wide, would swarm an area, a carpet of shifting, building insects. As each cell was finished, it was sealed, joined to the adjacent cells, and then the microbots would move on. Under the greenhouse, heat was allowed to build, water vapor from the subsoil released, oxygen processors worked, a breathable atmosphere established. “I went there to study their approach, see how they are using microbots for the construction of their cells. Brilliant. Some of the techniques are ones we have adapted for Europa, and to a lesser extent the prospectors on Titan use ‘em, too.”
She nodded, said nothing, just checked the status of the flight.
He looked out the window of the cockpit, at the snow glowing on the tops of the Rockies in the late afternoon sun, the sky almost clear for once. This happened sometimes when a front moved through, reminding him of the mornings of his youth. Back then, you could even see the Milky Way at night. The fine dust kicked up by the nukes in the Far East changed all that, just as it had shifted the planet’s albedo and subtly altered the climate. Now at night, you were lucky to be able to make out the brightest stars with the naked eye, and only then if you were outside of a city.
“Well,” she said, “it won’t be too long before we’re there. Got all your connection information?”
“Oh, yeah. My expert is pretty good at handling such things - leaves almost nothing to chance.”
* * *
At the Denver airport he had plenty of time to make his connection to Toronto. The flight only took about two hours, moving from late afternoon in Denver into darkness over the Midwest, arriving in Toronto at about 7:00 local time. He decided to nap during the flight, being reasonably sure that the next few days would be very demanding. He picked up a meal at the airport and ate in the car on the way over to his office, relaxing and watching the city roll by around him.
The USSA building, like most other structures built in the last decade, made use of the engineering and aesthetic innovations which resulted from the 'New Earth' colonization efforts. Above ground, graceful arches of plasteel supported glass fabric, making the building seem like some gigantic percussion instrument. Tonight the fabric was opaque over most of its surface, a dull white in the early evening darkness. Unlike most recent buildings, this one had more of its useable space below ground than above, and incorporated other passive defensive designs. In addition to the crazies, such as the Edenists, there were still a few people who didn't much care for any form of government, even one as loose and generally libertarian as the restored US.
He cleared through security, where a message was waiting for him to continue straight to the conference room, that there was a meeting scheduled to begin shortly. ‘Yeah, right’, he thought and headed for his office. It would only take a couple of minutes to check in with Seth and get some information so he didn't walk into the meeting completely in the dark. Crossing the broadcast threshold, he felt his personal computer system link into the rich data environment of the USSA headquarters. It was like being immersed in a pool of warm water, with all the information flowing around him through shaped transmissions, designed to travel only within the confines of the secure building. Seth’s apparent image materialized beside him, keeping pace with him as he walked briskly to his office.
“Hi boss.”
“Hi Seth.” Jon just talked to the not-quite thin air next to him. It was common enough to see people walking through the halls, or sitting at their desks, chatting with someone invisible. He could have Seth give him the feed for the images of the other experts, and see their ghostly manifestations, if he wanted.
His expert was one of best, one of only a few hundred based on the new semifluid CPU technology that surpassed the best thin-film computers made by the Israelis. But it was a quirky technology, just a few years old, subject to problems that conventional computers didn't have, and still not entirely understood. Even less settled was whether the experts based on this technology could finally be considered to be true AI. The superconducting gel that was the basis of the semifluid CPU was more alive than not, and the computer was largely self-determining once the projected energy matrix surrounding the gel was initiated by another computer. Building on the initial subsistence program, the computer would learn how to refine and control the matrix to improve its own 'thinking'. The thin-film computers had long since passed the Turing test, and these semifluid systems seemed to be almost human. But did that constitute sentience? Jon considered it to be a moot point, of interest only to philosophers and ethicists.
Seth’s image, slightly more opaque than smoke, was that of a man with dark complexion, black hair, probably Mediterranean heritage, about 30 years old. Seth had explained some time back that he chose the image to reflect some of the Biblical and historical references to the name (which had been assigned to him by the firm which built him). Of course, there was no real reason for him to bother with an image at all, but he did this as a simple courtesy to his human co-workers, whenever possible.
They had arrived at his office. Jon sat behind his desk, Seth stood in front of it. The expert said, "The rest of the designated staff is already in the building. I told them that you weren't here yet, but Security will get around to letting them know of your arrival any moment now. "
Jon nodded. "Thanks. So what's the meeting about? What happened?"
"Dr. Jakobs tried to contact you this morning. After hearing her message, I bounced it up to Director Magurshak. They found something on Titan. An artifact." Seth paused, looked down at his hands, "a nonhuman artifact."
Jon sat there for a moment, trying to digest what Seth said. According to what pretty much everyone thought, it wasn't possible. SETI, OSETI, META and BETA had pretty much settled that question for most scientists decades ago, and twenty years of settlement efforts throughout the solar system hadn't changed anyone's mind. Even with the Advanced Survey Array out at Titan Prime searching nearby systems for good settlement prospects, there had never been an indication that there was an intelligent, technologically advanced race anywhere within earshot. Seth knew Jon well, didn't let the silence wait. He looked back up, eyes level and unblinking, "It isn't a hoax. The artifact is definitely nonhuman, or at least non-contemporary human. Mr. Sidwell found it out near his base. Dr. Bradsen will have as much a report on it as is available, which isn't much."
"Sweet Jesus. It isn't possible, is it?"
"Well, it doesn't fit our current paradigm, but given that it exists, it seems to be very possible. Now you can see why this couldn't be discussed over an open line, whatever the encryption." Seth's image tilted his head slightly, as if listening to something in the distance.
"Sidwell found it?"
"Yes, some ten days ago. Didn't bother telling anyone at Titan Prime until yesterday. Susan Jakobs sent down a small crew of the science staff to confirm, and they decided against doing anything else until they got word from the brass here." Seth paused, a slight frown passed over his face. "Security has informed Director Magurshak that you're here. He wants to get the meeting started as soon as you can get there, but will meet with you privately before you go in."
"OK. Tell him I'm on my way." Jon got up from his desk, stepped out the door and down the hallway toward the conference room. Seth followed.
Waiting in the hallway outside the conference room was a tall man, solidly built. Ted Magurshak was more than a dozen years older than Jon, approaching sixty. His hair now mostly consisted of a fringe of salt and pepper on the sides; he chose not to use any of the baldness treatments because he liked the look it gave him, added a sense of being older than he was. And in a world where there were few people over the age of 65, and almost none over 70, age was very highly regarded.
They shook hands warmly. “I assume Seth told you what’s happened?”
“Yeah, briefly.”
“Well, given the significance of this, I want you to head the mission to investigate the artifact. We need someone on site who can make the necessary executive decisions, given the time-lag in communications.”
“Makes sense,” Jon said. “Have you had time to consider personnel yet?”
“No, but I have discussed it with Don. He already has some thoughts on the scientific component.”
Jon nodded. “Yeah, he’s the one to handle the field work.”
“Good. But I want you to be thinking about who else to take. People who won’t be prejudiced by their own narrow field of technical expertise.”
