Europa Strike(44)

Sam took special care to photograph that one from every angle. Something of the sort had been seen by humans before….

Finally, Sam guided Oscar to the west end of the Plaza, where a low, broad ramp rose into the open heart of a three-tiered step pyramid. On shrieking turbo-jets, it floated up the ramp, pausing once to turn and examine carefully the view to the east, noting walls, fallen statues, the reach of shadows, and the sky-stab of the Needle.

A perfect match, point by point.

Cutting back Oscar’s jets, Sam let the probe settle to the base of its Y, where portions of the machine’s body opened, rotated, and unfolded, extending a pair of wide and heavy treads. With a final, dwindling whine, the thrusters died away, pulling in and rotating slightly to fold back against the machine’s hull. Oscar was narrow enough now to fit through the slender, upright opening at the top of the ramp.

The rising sun was high enough by now to cast its warm rays directly into the chamber within the pyramid, a chamber open to the sky now, but probably enclosed once, before the city’s fall, possibly with glass or even plastic or metal. The people who’d built this city had been technologists of a high order, building with materials other than enduring stone. In half a million years, however, only the stone had survived.

And a few artifacts…

She watched Oscar as the ranger probe hissed its way gingerly into the stone-walled room, something like a golden sphere of polished metal etched deeply with a few geometrically ordered black lines. Above it, set into the wall, were slightly curved, rectangular screens—nine of them, though seven were black and lifeless.

On one of the remaining two, the image of another ruined city, similar to the one at its back, stretched toward a mountainous horizon beneath a sullen, black-patched red-orange sun far larger in the sky than Alpha Centauri A was here. And on the other…

Two humans worked together on some unseen project between them, their heads bent low, almost touching. The one on the left, in blue coveralls, was Dr. Paul Alexander. On the right, in U.S. Marine green utilities, was Major Jack Ramsey.

Sam Too engaged the voder in Oscar, opening a new communications channel. “Good morning, Jack,” she said, her voice the first speech to echo from these dusty walls in how many millennia? “Hello, Dr. Alexander. It’s very good to see you.”

Both figures started at her voice, leaping back in almost comical astonishment, their faces turning up to stare at something just above their physical pickup. Jack pointed, Paul nodded and adjusted some control.

“Sam?” Jack said, his face eager. The voice was tinny, a bit faint, but Sam could easily adjust the gain on Oscar’s receivers to hear it better. “Sam! You fucking made it!”

The words, transmitted instantaneously across almost four and a half light years, were as predictably banal as Dr. Bell’s historic “Come here, Watson. I need you.”





EIGHT


12 OCTOBER 2067

CWS Xenoarchaeological

Research Base

Cydonia, Mars

1340 hours, Cydonian Local Time

(2200 hours Zulu, Earth)





Major Jack Ramsey stared into the monitor, shock transforming into delight. Display 94725 still showed the same background panorama it always had, looking out into the Plaza, with the slender thrust of the Needle in the distance…but now, much of the scene was blocked by the hulking silhouette, black against the rising sun on the far horizon, unmistakably the insect shape of one of Sam Too’s remote planetary surface probes. Despite the shadows, he could make out the glitter of the probe’s twin optics as they swiveled to look him directly in the face.

“My God, Sam,” Jack said. “It’s good to see you!”

“Technically, you’re not seeing me,” the probe replied. It was almost impossible to hear the gritty words. David, at Jack’s right, reached out to the control touchboard and tried boosting the gain. “You are seeing Probe Oscar as I teleoperate it from orbit. But I understand your meaning.” A panel near the base of the probe opened, and a multijointed arm unfolded. Jauntily, across four and a half light years, the probe waved.

And Jack, scarcely believing what was happening, waved back.

His first thought was of how chest-swelling proud he was of Sam Too. The last word he’d had was four and a half years out of date, when the Ad Astra had been approximately three-quarters of the way to her destination. He was seeing living proof on the display screen that Sam, his Sam, had successfully made it to another star.

Sam Too was descended from the original Sam, who he still kept as his secretary on his PAD. He’d put her together himself, using several commercial secretary programs, when he’d still been a kid, and taught himself a thing or three about chaos logic along the way. That Sam had turned out to be flexible and adaptive enough to abandon set programming parameters at a crucial point and literally take a guess. Most advanced AI work since then had followed the same application of deep chaos logic—and Sam Too, a product of both his own efforts and the Advanced Software Design Team at Pittsburgh’s Hans Moravec Institute, was just about the sharpest AI there was now.