Noumenon Infinity

“All’s a go, sir.”

“Then have at ’er.”

The last thing Caz would have to hook up was the generator. She retrieved it with the puppets, as Ivan and Aziz made a slow, straight path across the ice. The Nataré team had picked a two-by-two acre area as their starting point. On the next away mission they’d bring down more of their colleagues, who’d expand the perimeter while they got to work on the first dig site—provided the GPR found anything worth digging up.

“Okay everybody,” she called when her work was done. “Floodlights coming on in three, two, one.”

As the lights snapped on, revealing the glittering fractures in the debris-covered ice, her teammates took turns crying out theatrically at the loss of their night vision.

“Yeah, yeah, all right,” she laughed. “My eyes! The goggles do nothing!” She started to send the autons back—their job complete—when one caught a faint glint in the distance. It was a reflection too dim for human eyes to catch, brassy in color—very unlike the glimmer dancing off the ice.

Without a word, she sent the single auton to investigate. It bounded over the surface, sliding a little as it met the downward slope of a small crater, shards of stone tumbling around its mechanical feet. Then it was up the other side, and Caz focused one of its external lights on the curious spot.

It was definitely metallic, jutting up from the slight rim at an outward angle. It extended maybe a foot above the surface, perhaps the result of the impact itself—ore melting under the heat of friction, splashing upward and then cooling quickly as it encountered the frigidness of space. There were similar nodules around its base, all angled, these no more than a few centimeters in height.

But as the auton came upon them, she realized the cylindrical, if nonuniform, shape was familiar.

Could it—?

She hadn’t let herself hope—still didn’t want to. Fighting the thrill of anticipation, she ignored the weakness in her knees and tried to still her heart as it fluttered wildly.

It could be nothing. It’s probably nothing, she told herself as she jogged in the auton’s direction, only to settle into a walk. It took a lot of willpower to force herself to move slowly, deliberately attempting to look unbothered. No use drawing the others’ attention. Not unless it turned out to be something worth the diversion.

But Ivan noticed her shifting attention, saw her initial run off into the night.

“Sir?” he asked, pausing his trudge behind the GPR skiff as she moved past him.

She didn’t answer.

“Caz?” Aziz prompted. “Caznal, what—?”

The breathy echo in her helmet grew louder as she directed the auton to dig. She had to see, had to know right now.

The robot thrust its fingertips into the ice, smashing the frozen surface. It scraped away pummeled debris from the object’s sides, slowly revealing more of the same.

Leaving the newly illuminated dig site felt like stepping off a cliff. Now, instead of comforting, her small halo of light felt claustrophobic, restraining. As though it kept her hemmed in from the planemo’s secrets on purpose.

She tripped over herself on her way to the auton’s side—it was difficult trying to mentally maneuver the puppet’s limbs contradictory to her own—and the shouts of her name over the comms system became more frantic.

“I’m fine!” she said, though it appeased no one. Both their concern and curiosity had been piqued, if the continued comms chatter was anything to go on.

By the time she reached the robot, it had loosened the ground around the primary object, plus the five nodes nearest. She fell to her knees, joining it, scraping aside what she could with her clumsy, gloved hands.

Something in the back of her mind perked, and she realized it was dangerous to test her suit this way. What if she dug down to something sharp and punctured her glove? She could lose pressure, or worse—just because the planet was cold, that didn’t mean it was barren. There could be dormant microbes beneath the surface, just waiting to encounter a carbon-based life-form.

Though the thought gave her momentary pause, she kept digging. She knew it was irrational, that she should approach this like the tempered scientist she was, and yet the excitement was overwhelming.

And now, close up, she was sure: this oddly formed metal was the spitting image of the Nest’s outer piping, Nataré technology used in their graviton supercycler. Only this seemed to be inverted. Where the Nest’s cycler dangled beneath the ship, this thrust upward, like the prongs of winter branches.

“Over here!” she cried at last, the dam of self-restraint no longer bowing under her exhilaration, but breaking. “I found something! Bring the GPR!”

I found them, she said to herself. I found the Atlanteans.

Ground-Penetrating Radar revealed at least three other supercycler tree structures near the surface, plus a few odd shapes of peculiar density that could be—based on their uniformity—buildings.

They still had to adhere to their four-and-a-half-hour ground schedule, but when they got back to the shuttle, there was much whooping and hollering, and a promise from the pilot to treat them all to an allowance of her special home brew from modified barley.

Ivan forgot himself for a moment and nearly whisked off his helmet after take-off. Only Aziz catching his hands and whacking him on the top of the thing saved him from an arduous level of extra decontamination when they docked with Hippocrates.

Even the scrubbers and the doctors gave them all hearty congratulations. And while Caz was still excited, she was far more subdued. Introspective.

Because the initial thrill of discovery had worn off, her adrenaline had ebbed. The careful thought she should have applied prior to running off into the night now occupied her every moment.

When the team was finally given the go-ahead to strip out of their pressure suits, Caznal’s gaze fell on her apprentice, and she knew what was wrong. The dark curls of his hair framed his tan face and swooped over his ears just so, emphasizing the strong arched slope of his nose. From this angle—with his helmet propped triumphantly under one arm, smile bright and proud—he was the spitting image of a classical statue of a Turkish youth she’d seen in the archives once, but it was his resemblance to someone else that urged her to head to Hvmnd as soon as the doctors declared them all contaminate-free.

The pilot running unscheduled flights from Hippocrates to Hvmnd looked surprised to have a passenger, which wasn’t unusual in Caznal’s experience. Not many people made regular visits to the server ship like she did.

The nine original convoy ships were very different in design from the three added upon Convoy Seven’s second launch, reflecting centuries upon centuries of Earth-centric design evolution. Where the original ships were, in many ways, reminiscent of a cross between zeppelins and beetles, both in their color and nature—being mostly bulbous (save Solidarity and Bottomless II, which were like floating towers) and silvery, and very utilitarian in their individual design differences—the newer ships were earthy. They were dark, and their exteriors had flows and layering that looked imperfect, more natural than designed. If the first nine were biomechanical (heavy on the mechanical), the additional three were geomechanical: they seemed to have morphology, weathering, like they were composed of stones and mud brought together by sheer gravitational adherences.

Of course, fundamentally, they were still ships. But she’d bet her leisure rations any aliens making visual contact with Slicer, Hvmnd, and Zetta would do a double take when they realized they weren’t looking at aesthetically pleasing asteroids.

Disembarking, she was met by one of the caretakers, Ina, who she knew best of all the server ship workers, save the captain. Though best didn’t mean well. It was difficult to truly know anyone who’d been raised on Hvmnd well.

That was because Hvmnd occupied a strange nexus between the convoy’s morality, culture, and the need for Earth’s computing technology. Earth-proper no longer used artificial computers—a fact which nearly led to I.C.C.’s demise—and had learned to use organic power (human brains, animal brains, partial neural networks that could only loosely be called brains) to a much greater advantage. So when the convoy had relaunched, decked out with all the advancements the planet had to offer, the package had included a computing upgrade: clone lines whose sole purpose was to act as human servers.

That didn’t sit well with the board. It might be common for people to sell years of their life away on Earth, but the convoy found it appalling.

They’d intended to shut down that portion of Hvmnd once they were well away from Earth’s watchful eye. After all, with I.C.C. and its inorganic servers fully functional, there was no real need to revamp the original system.

But that was before the conversion of Zetta into a graviton supercycler. Zetta had been built to store the zetta-joules of energy the convoy was expected to retrieve once they completed the Dyson Sphere around LQ Pyx. But the crew had needed it for a different purpose: to turn on the Nest. And this new purpose carried a hefty need for processing power. Power the convoy’s antiquated computing system could not provide.

Hvmnd was required after all.

And yet, cloning lines simply to harvest their brain power would not do.

The server clones had to be given a chance at wakefulness, which meant they would sometimes be off-line. The convoy would either need to accept this disruption, or find a new way to fill the computing void. None of the regular crew members wished to give up portions of their lives to such a service, so where could they get perfectly good brains no one was using anymore?

There was a reason some people called Hvmnd “the grave ship.”

“Permission to visit?” Caznal asked.

The caretaker bowed slightly, revealing the row of implanted connections on the top and sides of her shaved head. “Of course.” She gestured for Caz to follow her out of the bay.

“How are your children?” Caz asked as they entered the main bay.

“Sleeping,” Ina said simply, stopping at a row of iron black steps and indicating Caz should continue without her.

Her boots rattled the connected, corrugated catwalk as she ascended to the level above, and the fine blond hairs on the back of her neck rose with the shock of cold. It was unpleasantly chilly outside of the shuttle bay—for those that were awake, that is. Most of Hvmnd was a single bay, like Slicer, only instead of alien devices, Hvmnd stored people. Catwalks, like the one Caznal was on, snaked this way and that through the many layers of hanging chairs, which held people from all divisions, plugged in and strung up.