THE SHIP E-Book

Dave West

• Herausgeber: Signum-Verlag
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Scratching the surface of eternity... For a thousand years, the intelligent machines of Earth have been sending light-fast probes to the stars. They were to establish colonies, sow the seeds of the Cluster, of machine consciousness, continue its evolution on the cosmic stage and search for other forms of intelligence, for biological civilizations and survivors of the "world fire" that had wiped out several highly developed peoples a million years ago. What they found were ruins, traces consisting of artifacts left behind by the Muriah, the only known advanced civilization in the Milky Way, which had perished before the conflagration. They followed this trail from solar system to solar system in search of the "Cascade", a system of tunnels through space-time created by the Muriah that had once enabled them to travel across the galaxy - the machines of Earth, created by the ancestors of the last, immortal humans, aspired to the technological legacy of the Muriah. But they only discovered devastated worlds or young planets with still primitive life. Their search did not go unnoticed. In the vast abysses between the stars, there were eyes that watched and ears that heard everything, even the faintest electromagnetic whisper in the void of interstellar space. Time hardly mattered to these eyes and ears. For centuries, they contented themselves with observing the probes sent out by Earth's machine Cluster and listening to the probes' signals. Information was collected and evaluated, eventually leading to a decision. In the darkness between the stars, something woke up and began to stir...

Leseprobe

DAVE WEST

THE SHIP

A novel

Signum-Verlag

Content

Legal notice 

The book 

The author 

THE SHIP 

Scratching the surface of eternity 

A storm 

The ticking of the clock 

Out of nowhere 

That silence surrounds me 

A net 

Truths 

The man in the dust 

Count the grains of sand 

Between war and peace 

A watchful eye 

The taste of infinity 

The price for the future 

Boundary lines 

Broken dreams 

Last steps 

The path of the snake 

More than the sum of all parts 

Calculating the possible 

Close to heaven 

Re-encounters 

Collapsed future 

The last interval 

Light years like grains of sand 

Where angels whisper 

The eagle flies 

Black rain 

A red planet 

The supervisor 

The ship 

The sea of stars 

Glossary 

Legal notice

Copyright © 2025 by Dave West/Signum-Verlag.

Editing: Christian Dörge and Dr. Birgit Rehberg.

Cover-Artwork: Copyright © by Christian Dörge.

Publisher:

Signum-Verlag

Winthirstraße 11

80639 München, Germany

www.signum-literatur.com

[email protected]

The book

 

Scratching the surface of eternity...

For a thousand years, the intelligent machines of Earth have been sending light-fast probes to the stars. They were to establish colonies, sow the seeds of the Cluster, of machine consciousness, continue its evolution on the cosmic stage and search for other forms of intelligence, for biological civilizations and survivors of the "world fire" that had wiped out several highly developed peoples a million years ago. What they found were ruins, traces consisting of artifacts left behind by the Muriah, the only known advanced civilization in the Milky Way, which had perished before the conflagration. They followed this trail from solar system to solar system in search of the "Cascade", a system of tunnels through space-time created by the Muriah that had once enabled them to travel across the galaxy - the machines of Earth, created by the ancestors of the last, immortal humans, aspired to the technological legacy of the Muriah. But they only discovered devastated worlds or young planets with still primitive life. 

Their search did not go unnoticed. In the vast abysses between the stars, there were eyes that watched and ears that heard everything, even the faintest electromagnetic whisper in the void of interstellar space. Time hardly mattered to these eyes and ears. For centuries, they contented themselves with observing the probes sent out by Earth's machine Cluster and listening to the probes' signals. Information was collected and evaluated, eventually leading to a decision.

In the darkness between the stars, something woke up and began to stir... 

The author

 

DAVE WEST, born in Wisconsin, USA in 1973, has been living in Italy, in Porto Ercole, Monte Argentario (Tuscany) since 2017. He has been fascinated by science fiction since he was a child. He read everything related to space and began writing his own stories at an early age. He has remained true to fantastic literature to this day. But he's not only interested in our distant future on foreign planets, but also in the world in which we will live tomorrow. His scientific thrillers, including those about artificial intelligence, are set in the near future, are based on careful scientific research and show how our lives could change in just a few years. 

THE SHIP

You will find a glossary at the end of the book.

Soar, eagle, and fly high enough to see the future. 

  Scratching the surface of eternity

For a thousand years, the intelligent machines of Earth have been sending light-fast probes to the stars. They were to establish colonies, sow the seeds of the Cluster, of machine consciousness, continue its evolution on the cosmic stage and search for other forms of intelligence, for biological civilizations and survivors of the "world fire" that had wiped out several highly developed peoples a million years ago. What they found were ruins, traces consisting of artifacts left behind by the Muriah, the only known advanced civilization in the Milky Way, which had perished before the conflagration. They followed this trail from solar system to solar system in search of the "Cascade", a system of tunnels through space-time created by the Muriah that had once enabled them to travel across the galaxy - the machines of Earth, created by the ancestors of the last, immortal humans, aspired to the technological legacy of the Muriah. But they only discovered devastated worlds or young planets with still primitive life.

Their search did not go unnoticed. In the vast abysses between the stars, there were eyes that watched and ears that heard everything, even the faintest electromagnetic whisper in the void of interstellar space. Time hardly mattered to these eyes and ears. For centuries, they contented themselves with observing the probes sent out by Earth's machine Cluster and listening to the probes' signals. Information was collected and evaluated, eventually leading to a decision.

In the darkness between the stars, something woke up and began to stir.

They stood in the observatory: a human, old and frail, carried by a mobilizer, and an avatar, a representative of the intelligent machines that had ruled Earth for millennia. Stars shone above them in a deceptively real-looking sky; colored markings highlighted those systems that had already been reached by probes.

"We talked about evolution," said Adam. He had visited some of the stars up there. He could no longer walk under his own power, but he could wander across distant worlds in alien form. That was his privilege as a mortal. "Aren't we humans your gods?"

"There are no gods, Adam," said the avatar called Bartholomew. "We haven't found any anywhere."

"But we humans created you."

"That's right."

"Nevertheless, we hardly play a role anymore. All the important decisions are made by you."

"Isn't it better this way, Adam? We'll take care of you. We protect you. We make sure that people can live their immortal lives in peace and quiet."

"We created you," Adam said again. "You are our children."

"Don't the parents step back when the children grow up and take their fate into their own hands?"

"These parents don't grow old and frail like me," said Adam. "They live forever and accompany their children through the millennia."

"Sometimes children outgrow their parents, Adam. I suppose that's the evolutionary aspect you mean."

"You are developing faster."

"Much faster, Adam."

"We are static. I mean, the immortals are, not me. Not us Mindtalkers. We evolve by growing old and eventually dying."

Bartholomew remained silent.

"Evolution," Adam said, listening to the sound of the word. "Biological life that creates machines and is outstripped by them. Is there a law of nature behind it? Is that natural evolution?"

"Nobody forced you humans to build machines. You did, and we are the result."

  A storm

1

The clouds hung low and heavy over the gray, churning ocean. The wind whipped the waves higher, as if they wanted to outdo each other, crashing against the cliff and smashing against the hard rock. Gusts took the spray and tossed it upwards to where Adam stood, three dozen meters above, his weak body held up by his mobilizer, which wrapped around him like an exoskeleton. He had refrained from activating the shield; nothing protected him from the wind and rain.

"Oh, here you are, Adam," a voice sounded behind him. It was a quiet voice, but it easily drowned out the thundering of the surf. "I've been looking for you."

"How can you have been looking for me when you always know exactly where I am?"

The mobilizer helped Adam to turn his head. A man was standing next to the capsule that had brought him here. He looked different from the last time they had met, which was only a few days ago, but that was often the case with the avatars of the machines. Still, he recognized him: Bartholomew, his mentor and mediator, the man whose calm wisdom had guided him all these years. He had come with an MFV of the Cluster, a multifunctional vehicle, silver like himself: a beetle-like structure that stood next to Adam's pod like an insect ready to pounce.

Behind it stretched a plain that had once - before the great flood that Bartholomew had told him about a few weeks ago, or perhaps years ago, he couldn't remember exactly - formed a high plateau. Trees crouched there in the wind, and for a moment something unexpected appeared between them: a figure wearing cream-colored clothes. Adam blinked in surprise and took a closer look, but between the trees there were only the thickening shadows of the evening.

Bartholomew came closer. "Why are you using a mobilizer and not a factotum?"

"I wanted to experience the sea," said Adam, looking ahead again. "I wanted to see it, hear it and feel it."

"It's cold and wet in this place and you're no longer young," said Bartholomew. "You could get sick."

"You could heal me. It wouldn't be the first time."

"Our options are limited too, Adam. You're not like other people. You are old."

An ugly word, old. Adam struggled to smile and felt rain hit his face. "The others are much older than me, some of them even older than you." Curiosity awoke in him. "How old are you, Bartho?" 

"A thousand years," said Bartholomew. He was now standing next to Adam at the edge of the cliff. "I saw the first probe set off for the stars."

"There you go. Some of the immortals are much older. Some of them date back to the time of the Great Flood, when everything on Earth was flooded. How long ago was that?"

"Almost six thousand years."

Supported by the mobilizer, Adam raised his hand, wiped the rain from his eyes and looked out over the sea again. A flash of lightning flickered in the distance, bright and beautiful, and in its light hundreds, thousands of waves rolled in. He compared them to the thoughts running through his head, waves of a mental ocean, most of them shallow, tired from age. Sometimes he tried to hold on to them, but they slipped away like water from the fingers that tried to grasp it. He was a little surprised at the clarity with which he now thought about it. Maybe it was the ocean, the wind and the rain, he thought. Perhaps they had driven the fog from his skull.

"Why can't I be like the others?" he asked. "Why did I have to grow old? Why do I have to die in the end?"

"We've talked about this many times, Adam. I've explained it to you."

Did he have that? There were many gaps in his memory, created by the years. Bartholomew, on the other hand, never forgot anything. He remembered everything, every little detail of his thousand years of life. There he stood, a man with silver skin, short hair, large gray eyes and a strikingly long nose, not a human, but an avatar, a factotum of the intelligent machines, the Cluster that also stretched out here beneath Adam's feet, or rather beneath the cliff and the churning sea. The rain rolled off him, barely seemed to touch him.

"For some people, the treatment fails," said Bartholomew. "I'm sorry about that. We're working on it."

The moment of clarity lasted. "For six thousand years?"

"The problem is complicated, even for us. The Omega Factor resists our efforts to make all humans immortal. We have not yet found a way to outwit it. It makes itself felt in one in a thousand newborns. We can't do anything about it," emphasized Bartholomew. "Not yet."

"I'm one in a thousand," said Adam, watching the sea.

"Yes."

"Am I important?"

"You're actually very important, Adam. That's why I'm here. We have a task for you. A new mission."

One gust of wind howled louder than the others and was powerful enough to carry the crest of a large wave up to the edge of the cliff. Foamy water splashed against Adam, so violently that even the mobilizer had trouble keeping him upright. He tasted salt and thought: How much power there is in wind and water. What I feel up here is only a tiny part of it. How strong the waves must be down there, each of them with the power of an entire ocean behind them, and the storm that piles them up.

"My last mission was only two days ago." The wind took his words and carried them away. Adam imagined them joining the rain and storm. Perhaps they lived on, even if no one heard them. Spoken words that lived longer than their speakers, that eventually fell to the ground caught in raindrops or drifted around the world clinging to clouds. It was a strange thought, Adam thought. Perhaps it was even one of the stupid thoughts that wandered through his head when he was feeling worse. Neurodegeneration. That's what Bartholomew and the other avatars sometimes called it. 

"A week," said the silver man at his side. "You've been back with us for a week."

"Really? A week already? It seems shorter to me."

"You slept most of the time. We took care of you and treated you to make you feel better." Up to this point, the silver man's voice sounded gentle, but there was a certain reproachful edge to his next words. "Otherwise, you couldn't be here now, risking life and limb on something that makes no sense."

Bartholomew did not move, his arms remained at his sides and his hands down, but suddenly there was a shield, a thin curtain of energy separating Adam from the storm, keeping the wind, rain and cold away from him. The hissing of the gusts became quieter, so quiet that he heard the hum of the servomotors as he raised his hand again, wiped wetness from his forehead and put his fingers to his mouth to taste the salt of the sea.

"I was by the sea as a child," he said. "I grew up with wind and waves. This is not meaningless, but part of my life." Almost defiantly, he added: "The years have not been kind to me, but they have not taken away all my memories."

"Please excuse me," Bartholomew said gently again. "I understand. Maybe you can understand me too. You are important, yes. We need you. There aren't many like you." Another flash of lightning flickered, much closer this time, and almost immediately thunder rolled across sea and land. "Let us go. We shouldn't risk you getting struck by lightning. It might be too much for the shield."

Adam turned away from the sea, or perhaps it was the mobilizer that thought the time had come to return to the capsule. His searching, curious gaze went past her to the windswept trees, but all remained dark between them.

"Are you looking for something?" asked Bartholomew, following Adam's gaze.

"No." He had probably just imagined the cream-colored figure. Adam opened the pod's hatch, and the mobilizer extended the energetic shield to the small, fragile-looking craft that had brought him to the ocean. He climbed in and suddenly felt tired, as if after a strenuous march.

Bartholomew was already in the Cluster vehicle, hovering above the rain-soaked ground on a ruby-red gravity cushion. "I've established a link and am piloting us both, Adam. I don't want to lose you again." He smiled, and it looked strange, that smile, it didn't seem to fit the silver face, nor the analytical looking gray eyes. "We'll send you back up soon." He pointed upwards. "To the stars."

As the capsule carried him through the night, Adam remembered that Bartholomew had not answered his original question. How could you have been looking for me when you always know exactly where I am? The machines always knew where he and the other one hundred and thirty Mindtalkers were, because they carried something inside them that sent signals and spoke to them all the time. 

Adam closed his eyes, fell asleep and dreamed of a boy running in the rain over wet sand, past waves that tried to reach his nimble feet.

2

Evelyn, four hundred and nineteen years old for twenty-two days, stood in the night and rain, feeling as stupid as a child. The scrambler protected her from the machines' locator beacons, but couldn't save her from simple visual detection. Behind a tree, deeper inside the small forest, she ducked into the shadows beneath the wind rustling and cracking tops, her right hand closed around the scrambler as tightly as if it could make her invisible.

She had relied too much on the small device, on one of the many tricks the group had at their disposal and with which they repeatedly outwitted the Cluster of machines. A second scrambler was on board the capsule, waiting for them in a hollow about a kilometer away. Evelyn had believed that this precaution was sufficient, and under normal circumstances it would have been possible to make contact with the aged Mindtalker. Who could have expected an avatar to appear here, with sharp machine senses and the unflagging attention of the Cluster?

The old man in the mobilizer, the frail old man who was much younger than she was... He had seen her, just for a moment, when she had been careless. But the avatar's eyes, its visual sensors, had been forward. He couldn't have seen her, and the scrambler protected her from his signals.

Lightning flickered and lit up the night, tearing away the darkness for a split second, even here under the dense treetops. Evelyn waited, her back leaning against a trunk, her legs drawn up, her arms wrapped around her knees. It was cold, but for a while she could have borne the chill even naked, without the cream-colored robe that now clung to her and warmed her. If she didn't stay exposed to the low temperatures for too long, there was nothing to worry about. The treatment that had given her immortality three hundred and eighty-nine years ago, on her thirtieth birthday, protected her body not only from ageing, but also from disease.

Half an hour passed without an Avatar appearing and asking her what she was doing in this place. When Evelyn returned to the edge of the forest, the Mindtalker's capsule and the avatar's multifunction vehicle were gone. She was relieved that the machines had not discovered them, but she was also disappointed. This would have been a good opportunity to talk to the Mindtalker and begin to gain its trust.

She turned and walked through the rain, past the swaying, creaking trees, until she reached the hollow where her pod rested, in dark mode, just a shadow in the night. The hatch opened as Evelyn stopped in front of her, and twenty seconds later she was sitting in the pilot's chair.

A setback, Evelyn consoled herself as she steered the capsule through the storm. Nothing more. She knew the data signature of the localizer that the Mindtalker was carrying. So it should be possible to find it again without too much effort and wait for a favorable opportunity.

3

Adam woke up during the preparations and asked: "Where are you taking me this time? Maybe to a planet with warm oceans?"

Machine hands washed him with gentle thoroughness, applied ointment and treated sore spots that clearly indicated that the mobilizer had been used for too long. He let himself sink a little deeper into the opal blue emulsion, closed his eyes and imagined being washed by warm waves.

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you," Bartholomew's calm voice sounded from behind the bath. A clicking and humming sound indicated that the servomechanisms were programming the connector. The gravitational field was important, Adam vaguely remembered. It was about the polarization constants of the Earth's gravitational signature, whatever that meant. And the target had to be aimed precisely; even slight deviations could mean that the transferred consciousness missed its target. What happened to such a lost self, Adam wondered, as the servomechs' hands very carefully, to avoid breaking any bones, pulled him out of the bath and carried him to the connector in the center of the room. Did it perhaps fly through space forever and ever, past suns and planets, without ever reaching a world where it could slip into a body, look around and smell the alien air?

"Your target is Cygnus 29, an M-class main sequence star," said Bartholomew. "Do you know what that means? Do you remember?"

Adam remembered enough to say, "A red dwarf star." He didn't quite know if he liked stars like that. Their planets had to be quite close to them for them to receive enough heat. Warm seas were hardly to be expected on such worlds, rather cold tundras.  "But I don't know the name 'Cygnus 29'."

"Our probes reached that solar system two years ago. It is nine hundred and ninety-eight light years away from here."

"That's a long way," said Adam. The servos laid him on the warm cot and connected his body to the life support systems.

"Yes," Bartholomew confirmed. "Cygnus 29 is not far from the cognition border."

"Cogni..." It was a difficult word. A moment ago, Adam would have been able to say it and perhaps even understand its meaning, but suddenly a gray, cold fog drifted through his mind. It was not the first time he had experienced it, but that did not make it any less unpleasant. Bartholomew had once called it freeing the mind from all ballast. It supposedly facilitated the transfer of consciousness. 

"Cognition boundary," said Bartholomew kindly. "That means the boundary of the area of space explored by our probes. It's now a thousand light years away."

"I'll be right on the edge," Adam murmured. "Far, far away."

"We are always with you. You don't need to be afraid."

"Oh, I'm not scared. I'm... excited. I'm excited." He heard his heartbeat, a quickening thump, like the drumbeat at the start of a new adventure. Yes, he was excited. When he was out there, he could think much more clearly, because the connection with the machines seemed to give wings to every single thought.

"Would you like to see your destination, Adam?" asked Bartholomew.

"Yes," he said, opening the eyes that had just fallen shut, their lids heavy from the impending connection. "Yes, show me."

Above him, the gray ceiling of the connector room seemed to fall into space. A red sun suddenly appeared, a fireball many billions of years old, small and old, but nowhere near the end of its life. As tiny as this star might be compared to many others, it would burn much longer and continue to shine even after larger suns had exploded or collapsed. How strange that less fuel could burn longer than a large amount of it, Adam thought. He resolved to ask Bartholomew for an explanation when the fog disappeared from his mind.

The spheres of several planets moved in front of the sun, one of them large and striped, surrounded by rings of ice particles and orbited by numerous moons.

"That's C29-V," said Bartholomew. "A Jupiter-type gas giant. You remember Jupiter, don't you?"

"Yes. He used to have a big red eye. It's now closed."

"It was a storm bigger than Earth," Bartholomew said as the servomechs pointed the connector at the target nine hundred and ninety-eight light years away and focused the quantum mechanical entanglement link. "It hasn't existed for a few thousand years."

"Jupiter," muttered Adam. "A planet gone blind. Without an eye, it sees nothing." The fog in his head thickened.

"Two of the moons of C29-V have subglacial oceans with primitive forms of life," Bartholomew continued. There was something hypnotic about his calm voice. "There's an obelisk on one of them, probably a signal beacon."

One of the moons appeared, close enough to touch, its ocean hidden under thick ice. A pillar rose up, white as snow, tapering towards the top, like a thorn that had pierced the ice shell. The obelisk. On one side, narrow furrows formed signs and symbols that seemed familiar to Adam after all these years.

"Active?" Adam asked, dazed.

"No. Inactive like all the others. V and its moons are being investigated by a secondary probe. One of you two can take care of them and check up on them if you think it's appropriate."

"One of us?"

"Rebecca will accompany you."

"Oh, Rebecca," Adam said, no longer seeing the gas giant and its moon with the artifact, but a woman with whom he had spent several years of his life, back when they had been young. She had been beautiful, her hair as fiery red as the setting sun, her eyes as green as emerald. He remembered her sorrow, her fear of old age and death. How long ago had that been? Half a century? Not much by the standards of the immortals, but for people like Rebecca and him, more than half their lives.

"Are you happy to see her again?" asked Bartholomew. He stepped into Adam's field of vision, a friendly, smiling silver man. His nose seemed a little bigger, his eyes even more colorless.

"Yes, I'm happy, but... Why are you sending someone else? Am I not enough?"

"You'll have a lot to do, Adam. So much that you'll need help." Bartholomew hesitated briefly. "This mission is even more important than the others."

"Even more important," Adam repeated, thinking of Rebecca. He remembered with startling clarity how soft her lips had been.

"Yes, Adam. Our scouts not only found artifacts on the second planet, but also something else."

The striped gas giant with its halo of moons disappeared. Cygnus 29 swelled, taking up half the space that had just been occupied by the ceiling of the connector room, and in front of the red seething of the old sun a brownish-yellow sphere rotated, a planet the size of Earth but without its oceans. There were only a few half-dried inland seas, barely larger than lakes, fed by deep reservoirs of fossil water. In one of them, an extensive canal system and the remains of a city had been discovered.

"Ruins," muttered Adam. "More ruins..."

 A zoom brought them in and focused on a hill rising beyond the old city, half-buried under sand. Details became visible, regular structures uncovered by industrious servomechs.

"Oh," said Adam. "That's not a hill."

"We suspect it's a spaceship," said Bartholomew. "As old as the ruins of the city."

"A ship of the Muriah?"

The silver man nodded. "Yes. Do you understand now why this mission is so important?"

Adam fell silent and tried to think.

"Maybe there are recordings on board," Bartholomew added. "Retrievable, decodable data. Information that could help us find access to the Muriah's cascade."

The cascade of the Muriah, their ancient interstellar transportation system that had allowed them to travel throughout the Milky Way: Actuators that allowed the travelers to jump from star to star. This is what Earth's intelligent machines had been searching for since their probes had found the first artifacts more than nine centuries ago.

"We need your creativity, your experience," said Bartholomew. "We need your eye for the extraordinary."

Rebecca, Adam thought. I can see Rebecca again. And I'll be standing under a strange sky again, further away from earth than ever before.

The red dwarf star and its planets disappeared.

The gray ceiling returned.

"Only we can do that, can't we?" asked Adam, as curved walls rose to the right and left - the cylinder of the connector closed around him.

"Yes, just you," replied Bartholomew in an unchanged voice.

"The immortals, they live long, perhaps forever, but the stars are denied them." His eyelids grew heavy again. Adam closed his eyes. "They can't be transferred from the connector."

"No, they can't."

"Your soul would break if you tried, wouldn't it?" Adam heard his own voice, accompanied by the buzzing of the connector.

"You could call it that, yes. Your consciousness can't withstand the transfer."

Adam felt his mouth moving, his lips forming a smile. "Only we are able to visit all the distant worlds. Because we are mortal, and old."

"Yes."

The humming sounded like a song now; the connector sang him to the sleep of transfer. "And there are only a few of us. Only one hundred and thirty-one. Am I important, Bartho?"

"You're actually very important, Adam. We need you."

Adam smiled again. It felt good to be important.

Then he slept.

Two hours later, he woke up on another planet, almost a thousand light years away from Earth. 

  The ticking of the clock

4

"Can you hear me?" asked the servomech.

Adam opened his eyes. "I hear and see," he said. "I am, I think." He smiled, for his thoughts were clear, every one of them embedded in the machine presence that had received him at the end of the conjunction, nine hundred and ninety-eight light years from Earth. But there was something wrong with the sensory feedback, because the smile felt strange. He raised his hand and saw not the flexometal of a factotum - the amorphous metal that also made up the Cluster's avatars - but components, modules and servo elements that reminded him of a mobilizer. "Did something happen during the transfer?"

The servomech in front of him - a semi-automatic mechanism that looked like a two-meter tall silver-grey insect - perceived Adam's concern through one of the data channels.

"We have a resource problem," he said. "On the flight here, the primary probe was damaged in the Oort cloud of Cygnus 29. Equipment was lost. Two out of three breeders are damaged and still need to be repaired. Currently we can't make enough flexometal for two factots."

Adam understood immediately. "Rebecca is already here?"

"Seven hours," another voice said, and Adam turned around.

She stood in front of a wide window, a factotum in human form, her skin not silver like the avatars of the intelligent machines, but brown like fertile earth, her face deceptively human-like, a mask with replicas of eyes, nose and mouth, synthetic hair on top, short but red like the wild mane of her youth.

Behind her, stars shone above a slowly rotating yellow-brown planet that received red light from the left side, from a sun that Adam could not see.

He stood up and heard the hum of servomotors, like the mobilizer he used on Earth.

"Consciousness anchoring stable." The insect-like servomech backed away. "Connection stable. Link stable. Entanglement confirmed and stable."

"There are only four of the nineteen links left that the main probe left with," Rebecca said. Her voice didn't sound nearly as melodic as Adam remembered. Perhaps it was due to a provisionally programmed modulator; normally Rebecca paid attention to such details. "And they are faint links, as they were common almost a thousand years ago when this probe began its journey. I've ordered two to be kept in reserve for us. The other two are currently being used to bring new equipment through the main connector. But that will take a while, the bandwidth is very limited. We can take care of it if we find enough time. Maybe we can improve the efficiency of this old connector system."

Adam stepped towards her, and as he approached the window, the rotation of the probe brought a damaged segment into view, several cylinders half torn from their connecting sleeves, the outer hull shredded in several places. Servomechs slid through the void between the cylinders or had already deployed grav-anchors at the openings and were working with thermal torches.

"This probe is old," Rebecca emphasized once again. "It has no autoregenerative components and can't repair itself."

"Bartholomew mentioned several probes," Adam said. "What about the others?"

"There are five of them." Rebecca turned back to the window. "Two of them were lost when the ship was damaged. Two more are building a station on the planet, near the ruined city with the main artifact. The last probe is waiting for me at Cygnus V."

Adam nodded, hearing the hum of servomotors again. "And you were waiting for me."

"Yes. I wanted to see you before I set off for the gas giant and look at the obelisk on the ice moon." A smile appeared on the artificial face, on the mask. Rebecca came closer, stretching her brown, human-like arms towards him, which protruded from the wide sleeves of a saffron-colored robe. Adam would have liked to be deceived by the sight, but his eyes were made up of sensors that saw much more than the ordinary eyes of a human. With them, he recognized the patterns of amorphous metal that replicated smooth skin. They also allowed him to see behind the mask and recognize data modules that contained the consciousness of a human.

"I can't say you look good," Rebecca said, and then she laughed, almost like she had then.

"The last time we looked good was forty or fifty years ago," said Adam. "It's been a long time."

"Long for us," replied Rebecca. "For the immortals, forty years is little more than a drop in the ocean of time." She shrugged, but it looked awkward, clumsy. Maybe she hadn't gotten used to the new body yet; that sort of thing sometimes took days. "We're out of luck."

"Yes," said Adam. For a moment, despite the emotional damping that was supposed to stabilize his self, grief weighed on him, heavy as a mountain. It quickly disappeared again, but a shadow of it remained in a distant corner of Adam's soul.

An acoustic signal sounded and the insect-like servomech announced: "Two shuttles are ready. The first investigations should take place as soon as possible."

"Oh," said Adam. "We're being urged to hurry."

"I've been told twice to make my way to V," Rebecca said. "The Cluster is in a hurry."

The Cluster is far away, Adam thought. So far away that we can only hear a faint hiss from it here, limited by the scarce bandwidth. But over the data channels of the interface that connected Adam's consciousness to the imperfect body, and through it to the main probe, the local machine presence conveyed a sense of urgency.

"Why?" Adam asked in astonishment. "Why should we take action immediately this time, without the usual acclimatization period?"

The servomech walked briskly to the door, which opened without him activating a control mechanism.

"Something happened nineteen standard hours ago," Rebecca said.

"What?"

"The obelisk on the ice moon and the main artifact on the planet below us..." Rebecca gestured to the window. "...have sent a signal."

5

"Could it have something to do with the events in the Oort Cloud of this solar system? What happened there?" asked Adam.

"We don't know for sure," Rebecca replied as they reached the hangar with the two prepared shuttles. The outer bulkhead was open. The thin energy barrier of an atmospheric shield prevented the air from escaping into space. Outside, the damaged segments of the main probe could be seen even more clearly than before through the window of the connector room. Something had hit the central cylinder and half shattered it.

Adam noted that Rebecca said "we". She meant herself, the local machines and also the Cluster.

"We suspect a chain of unfortunate circumstances," she continued. "This probe came directly from Earth, not from one of the colonized systems. It left the Sol system a thousand years ago and did not come quite as close to the speed of light as the other probes that the Cluster later sent to the stars. Time dilation also made itself felt here, which means that time passed more slowly on board the probe than it did for us. But this technology..." Rebecca gestured to the entire probe. "...is still centuries old. There were defects in some subsystems. When the probe reached the Oort Cloud, there must have just been a collision between two comet objects. The braking phase had begun, and the pilot's ratiocondensate was performing evasive maneuvers, but the debris cloud appears to have been quite dense, and two of the three navigation shields were down to thirty-four percent of their normal capacity."

Adam looked outside and imagined how the primary probe and its smaller companions had hurtled through a debris field and been hit by several chunks, even though the artificial intelligence on board, the ratiocondensate, had tried its best to avoid them.

"It's a miracle there's enough left to get us here," said Rebecca.

"No connection with the signal?" Adam's thoughts were even clearer than they had been a few minutes ago, and he also felt that he was thinking faster than he had in his ninety-two-year-old body on Earth. The local machines were providing valuable assistance via the interface, trying to keep extraneous matters away from him and protect him from distraction. Their presence carried him, carried his every thought, took away the inertia of age and gave them some of the quick, agile maneuverability of those millions and billions of thoughts that the intelligent machines of the Cluster produced every single second.

"None that we know of," said Rebecca. "I've spent the waiting time putting together a short report. It's in the pilot's central database, but I can send it to you directly if you like." She followed the words with a step towards her shuttle. Enough of this, was the message of this one step. Let's get to work.

"Tell me." A few more seconds, Adam thought. Don't go yet. "What's the situation?"

"There's no doubt we're dealing with Muriah remains here," Rebecca said as the servomech opened the hatches on both shuttles. This clue was also clear. "They seem to be about a thousand years younger than the others we've found so far."

A thousand years is not much, Adam thought. Not on this scale. Not when it came to the history of a people who had traveled the Milky Way for over ten million years and visited many solar systems. And then the Muriah had suddenly disappeared from the galactic stage, even before the conflagration that had devastated thriving worlds and wiped out several highly developed peoples, including the Faenasi, Joalf and Xabrai, three cultures that had not reached anywhere near the level of development of the Muriah, but had been on the verge of leaving their solar systems.

The servomech hummed. Rebecca raised her hand. "Just one more moment. There's a distinct gravitational anomaly on the second planet, Adam. It can't be explained by the ruins of the city alone, which is already being excavated by the mechs."

"Bartholomew showed me pictures of a hill that might be a ship."

"The main artifact, yes. It could be more than a ship, maybe a large station."

"An actuator switch?" Adam asked hopefully. He remembered that Bartholomew and the other avatars of the Cluster had talked about it several times, about a hypothetical node of the interstellar cascade of the Muriah, a distribution station or a node that allowed new directions to be taken within the cascade.

"It might be an explanation for the gravitational anomaly: enough concentrated mass to make a deep dent in the local spacetime."

"A possible entrance to the cascade."

Rebecca smiled, and for a moment Adam managed to see the Rebecca he had known back then, before the failed treatment on his thirtieth birthday. A memory stirred deep within him.

"Perhaps with a key to the Muriah's technological treasure chamber, wherever it may be," said Rebecca. "Maybe the 'Hill' really is a ship that belongs to the station below. If we could decipher and copy the drive technology..."

"If there's anything left of her. A ship," Adam murmured, and there it was, the memory, images he had thought forgotten, suddenly unfolding before his inner eye. A ship, yes, but not suitable for space, not destined for flight between planets and stars. Adam saw a ship whose deck consisted of creaking planks. Wind blew across his face and billowed a sail as white as the cherry blossoms in his immortal father's gardens. In front sat Rebecca, twenty-seven years young and beautiful; she laughed every time the bow dug into a wave and welcomed the spray with outstretched arms. At the back, at the tiller, sat Adam's father Conrad, who was three hundred and forty-nine years old and yet hardly looked older than Rebecca - the treatment had stopped his biological clock at thirty years of physical life.

"Adam?"

Perhaps he would have blinked if he had been on Earth, in his now ninety-two year old body connected to life support systems in the connector. But this body - incomplete, just a scaffolding for his mind - had no eyes that could blink. How long has it been since I thought about my father? he asked himself, almost frightened. And when was the last time I saw him? 

"Adam? Is something wrong?"

A servomotor whirred as he raised his hand. "Old memories." He pointed to the shuttle behind Rebecca. "It's a shame we can't spend more time together."

"To reminisce? Oh, we'll take that time, Adam. As soon as we have the first evaluations behind us."

A minute later, they were both in their shuttles, moving away from each other - one heading for the fifth planet of the Cygnus 29 system, more than half a billion kilometers away, and the other falling towards the nearby yellow-brown sphere of the second planet.

6

A protective field surrounded Adam, an electromagnetic cocoon that shielded him from violent vibrations as the shuttle jumped through the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Through his interface, he heard the data static from the onboard systems and the primary probe remaining in orbit, but he paid it no mind, remembering that Rebecca had spoken of "we", and of "colonized systems". She meant the planets and moons of solar systems where Earth's envoys had settled, not humans but machines, though not nearly as intelligent as the Cluster's due to distance and range of connectivity. Was it really possible to speak of colonization, he asked himself. And where did the We fit in? The only people out here beyond the light-year-wide abyss were them: one hundred and thirty-one old people, mortal in a world of immortals, at the end of their lives, weak and frail, but with a strong soul that could be sent to distant stars through the connectors. It had something to do with neurodegeneration, with a mental decay that weakened the consciousness in many places, but strengthened the one ability that was important in the connectors. Bartholomew had explained it to him in one way or another many years ago; he no longer remembered the details. Or perhaps it wasn't this one strong talent amidst the many weaknesses that mattered. Perhaps it was precisely the weakness that played the decisive role, because it did not offer as much resistance to the quantum mechanical entanglement, the link, as a strong mind. A thousand years ago, when the first probes of the machines left the solar system at almost the speed of light, someone had called the old mortals "Mindtalkers", although their minds only traveled at first and they could only communicate mentally when they settled down in a borrowed body at the destination of their journey. 

"We're important," Adam muttered as the shuttle was shaken. It was intended for cargo, not for transporting people.

"Please repeat your instructions," said the shuttle's pilot, a simple ratiocinative with no intelligence of his own to speak of.

Adam moved his speaking tools again. "It wasn't an instruction. I was just thinking about something."

"Standby," said the pilot. Wisps of cloud flew past the side windows.

Adam felt a restlessness that he didn't like. "I'm not yet adapted to this body. Emotional dampening and intellectual stimulation leave a lot to be desired." He waited for the end of another shake, though he felt little of it inside the EM cocoon. "I have disturbing mood swings. Is there anything you can do about it?"

"No," said the pilot. "We have a resource problem. I don't have enough bandwidth available."

He didn't offer to return to the probe so that Adam could be better prepared for his mission there, and that was amazing enough. The machines were indeed in a hurry.

Adam leaned to one side - the protective field adapted to the movement - and looked out of the window. Below them were the remains of the inland sea with its extensive canal system and the ruins of the city, half buried under dust, sand and rubble. Adam knew the picture, Bartholomew had shown it to him, the sight looked familiar. But soon he could not only look at the ruins, he could walk among them and touch them, surrounded by the shadows of a strange past.

The remnants of the inland sea, only slightly larger than a lake, glistened in the light of the setting sun, and again memories rose up in Adam, showing him the sparkle of a sea that had once been cold high in the north of the earth, but on whose shores the cherry trees in his father's gardens blossomed in May. A few thousand years ago there had been snow and ice here, even at this time of year, but now you could almost bathe; the water just needed to warm up a little. Young Adam - this was his twenty-second birthday - sat on the dock, next to the sailboat the engines had built for his father, watching the glint of the sun just over the horizon and wondering what he should wish for. Further up the slope, on the main terrace of the villa, music and voices could be heard. His parents were waiting there, along with dozens of guests, who together were how old? Adam did a quick calculation. Almost half a million years. Eight more years and I'll be one of them, he thought, watching the clear water close beneath his feet as it slowly rose and fell. He only needed to lean forward a little, a small push with his hands, and the water, still too cold for a bath, would have taken him in.

Adam leaned forward, and perhaps he really would have given himself the last little push, for it was a strange moment and strange thoughts were running through his mind. But he heard footsteps approaching, turned his head and saw the young woman his father had introduced to him in the house an hour ago, surely not without reason. Rebecca was the daughter of Gossamer from Merika, thousands of kilometers to the southwest of the Green Country. Gossamer had been considered the best soundsculptor on Earth for over five hundred years, and more importantly for Adam's father, he was one of the High Hundred, the most influential Immortals. Adam suspected that his father wanted to bring him together with Rebecca so that he could establish good relations with Gossamer and eventually join the Hundred.

"Here you are," said Rebecca. She was wearing a thin white dress that showed off her figure. The wind moved her red hair - her head seemed to be on fire, like the horizon. "Beautiful." She gestured to the setting sun.

"Yes."

"The big moment has arrived," said Rebecca. "Your father wants to give his speech."

Adam sighed softly and stood up. "All right, then. Let's get this over with."

On the way up the stairs, Rebecca said: "This is inconvenient for you, isn't it?"

Adam shrugged his shoulders. "He's given me one wish. I'm sure he expects me to name it."

"So?" Rebecca grabbed his hand.

"I could wish he'd give me more time, but he might not understand," Adam said. "Or worse, he might feel insulted, in front of all the others." He sighed again. "The truth is, I don't know what to wish for."

Rebecca laughed good-naturedly. "A perfectly happy young man."

Many smiling faces and hands awaited him on the terrace, taking his hand or patting him on the back. His father Conrad took him aside and then began the prepared speech. Adam only listened with half an ear, watching the guests who formed a semi-circle in front of them, elegantly dressed men and women who all gave the impression of being around thirty years old. The only exception was Adam's mother Victoria. She stood a little apart, wrapped in a floor-length robe that barely showed any of her body, her face still a little hollow-cheeked despite the many regenerative treatments. She looked ten or fifteen years older than the others; that was the price she had paid for her pregnancy. With any luck, she would keep her immortality, but in a body that was forever a little older than the others.

Conrad spoke and spoke, and Adam's gaze slid over those gathered again. On his left, he noticed a woman he had never seen before, her narrow face slightly darker than the other Immortals' and framed by shoulder-length black hair. Her eyes were large and dark, and Adam realized that she wasn't looking at his father like all the others, but at him, all the time.

The guests clapped when Conrad finished his speech and handed Adam a small parcel.

"Happy birthday," he said. "Go ahead, open it."

Adam opened the package and found a watch. One of the old kind, analog, with hands, one of which moved across the dial second by second, accompanied by a soft ticking sound. He held the watch to his ear and listened to the ticking, which cut the time into small pieces.

"A masterpiece of mechanical precision," said Conrad. "Created from an ancient blueprint." He raised his brows. "With a few minor modifications. Look closely at the hands, my son."

Adam looked at her. Finally, he thought he understood. "The hands are going the wrong way."

"It's no ordinary watch," Conrad said loudly so that everyone could hear him. "It measures the time you have left until your thirtieth birthday. Until you become one of us.

The guests clapped again. Adam looked at his watch and watched the second hand run backwards.

"Now for your wish," said his father. "What have you thought about? What do you want?"

The strange moment Adam had felt down on the quay, when he had been about to drop into the cold water... That moment returned and took him away from everything. Something made him raise his eyes to the first star of the night in the clear, darkening sky.

"I want to go there," he heard himself say. "I want to leave the earth and go to the stars."

His father looked at him and laughed in surprise. "You certainly don't want that, my son. Only the old mortals, the Mindtalkers, are allowed such journeys. I can hardly imagine you wanting to grow old and eventually die." 

He laughed again and waved, whereupon the music resumed and the immortals continued their interrupted conversation.

Adam was suddenly standing alone, and when he looked to his left, he met the gaze of the woman with the shoulder-length black hair. She was still watching him...

"I've seen them!" the other Adam, seventy years older, who was sitting on board a shuttle surrounded by an EM cocoon, exclaimed.

"I beg your pardon," said the pilot.

Adam fell silent, thinking of the figure in the cream-colored robe that he had seen for a moment from the cliff, half hidden among the trees of the nearby forest. It had been the woman with the narrow face and large dark eyes who had watched him then.

"Adam?" asked the pilot.

Servomotors hummed softly as he raised his head. "Yes?"

"We landed five minutes ago. Do you need help?"

He looked at his hand, the polymer fingers equipped with tactile sensors, but in his memory he saw another hand, in it a quietly ticking clock. When it had turned out on his thirtieth birthday that the treatment was not working for him, that the biological clock ticking inside him could not be stopped... He had taken his father's gift and broken it.

"Adam?"

"Yes." He deactivated the protective field and stood up. A mission was waiting for him. 

  Out of nowhere

7

Adam walked for the second time past the ruins of the city that had been buried for a million years under brown-yellow sand and was now being uncovered by industrious machines. Thirty servomechanisms were measuring, probing, analyzing and digging; ten more were working tirelessly to build the station where one of the two damaged breeders would produce equipment material after repairs, using the local raw materials as a base material. Semiautomatic drills had driven tunnels through sand and rock to the places beneath the ruined city where the probe's orbiting sensors had detected minor gravitational anomalies. Adam had been in these tunnels a few hours ago, searching for inspiration. That was one of his tasks as a Mindtalker. The Cluster had sent him here so that the machine self of the primary probe could borrow his human intelligence and creativity. They helped each other: the probe's ratiocondensate gave him a body and stimulated his mind, keeping oblivion, fatigue and drowsiness at bay, freeing his consciousness from baggage and enabling him to think as clearly as he had many years ago. And in return, he thought for them, developed ideas, listened to the voices of intuition and inspiration and sometimes made important decisions.

The Cluster's problem was that, like the Immortals, it was tied to Earth. No matter how many probes it had sent into space, the combined potential of these 'colonists' did not come close to that of the intelligent machines on Earth. There was a lack of connections and links. From the Cognition Frontier, ordinary communication signals took a thousand years to reach Earth, and by the time they arrived, most of the information they contained had lost its value. Between the "colonies" the distances could be even greater. Of course, reports were regularly sent through the quantum links, expanding the collective knowledge, but the real-time data exchange so vital to the distributed consciousness of machine intelligence was missing. Without the Mindtalkers, the machine envoys, many light years away from Earth, would have had an even greater resource problem, one that could not be solved with breeders that produced needed equipment from almost any matter. Creating quantum mechanical entanglements, links that allowed data transmission and communication across hundreds of light years without delay, was a considerable effort even for the Cluster, and bandwidth always remained so limited that while status information could be sent - "cognition signals", as the Cluster sometimes called them - expanding the sphere of consciousness of terrestrial machine intelligence remained impossible. A human self, on the other hand - if it was suitable, if it was stuck in an old body and the first symptoms of neurodegeneration were making themselves felt - still found room enough in even the narrowest, tightest connector link. Perhaps the Cluster's consciousness is too big, Adam had once said to Bartholomew when the frosty, haughty Urania had also been present. Perhaps only the human soul is small enough to squeeze into the Link and reach the stars without being bound to the speed of light. Bartholomew, used to dealing with humans, both mortal and immortal, had recognized the irony in Adam's voice. But Urania had only arched an icy gray brow and turned a silent, condescending gaze on Adam.

In front of the main tunnel leading to the excavations beneath the city, Adam stopped and looked up. Stars shone in the sky, their light barely filtered by the thin atmosphere, which consisted mainly of carbon dioxide and nitrogen - if it had been any thinner, there would have been no liquid water left on the surface of the planet. On the left, the first red glow was already appearing on the horizon - it wouldn't be long before the sun rose, and then the temperature would rise from the current twenty degrees centigrade below zero to ten to fifteen degrees above freezing. Ice still glistened in the canals and on the shores of the inland sea, but it would be gone by evening, only to form again the next night.

"Have we already received a report from Rebecca?" asked Adam. The data channels also connected him to the chronolog of the primary probe in orbit, so he knew that Rebecca's shuttle must have reached the gas giant's icy moon half an hour ago.

"Not yet," replied his assistant, a multifunctional servomech who accompanied him at every turn. He also used a voice amplifier in the thin air. With communication signals, they could have communicated much faster and exchanged more information, but Adam had insisted on ordinary speech. He wanted his thoughts to have more time. "All we have so far is normal telemetry and a confirmation of arrival, nothing more."

Adam wondered why that worried him. Rebecca naturally needed time to gather initial impressions before she could send a report.

"Will we stick to the previous prioritization?" asked the assistant.

He expects me to make decisions, Adam thought as he stood in the cold night, in an atmosphere that would have killed an unprotected human in seconds. He had been here for hours, the soul of a man in the body of a machine, and had yet to give a single order. The servomechs remained diligent, they continued to work, digging, measuring and collecting data, but they proceeded according to the usual operational plan, without local creativity adapted to the situation. They were like hands that needed a head.

Adam entered the tunnel and immediately turned to the right. There was a room about twenty square meters in size with a ceiling so low that he could only stand in it bent over. The smaller servomechanisms used it for the storage of mobile secondary artifacts, in most cases items made of jade-like stone, ceramic or corroded metal. Crouching, he walked along the shelves, examining the objects on them in the light of one of the lamps that belonged to his new body. A data channel flashed information into his field of vision, but Adam made it disappear again - he didn't want anything to interfere with his visual perception.

"Have these artefacts already been examined and categorized?" he asked.

"Yes, Adam," the assistant replied. "They have no immediate use for the mission."

"That's the categorization? You haven't determined what purpose these items once served?"

"Our resources are limited."

"You've already pointed that out, yes." What a shame, Adam thought as his gaze swept over the objects. There were a million-year-old stories here, waiting to be discovered and told. "Are all these objects from the Muriah?"

"We don't know whether the city was built by the Muriah," said the servomech. "The dates of construction fit into their time frame, and we have found some symbols from the sign languages that the Muriah used at the time. But it's quite possible that these buildings here were once built by a local life form."

"An indigenous intelligence?"

"We discovered fossils during the excavations," said the servo. "There was biological evolution on this planet."

"Could intelligent creatures that have evolved here be responsible for the main artifact?"