Bridging Infinity Read online

  A slight crack, under a layer of liquefied air, and all more or less underneath Pierre’s habitat. Hank, arriving in her rover, had felt the premonitory shuddering. Now the main course arrived.

  When the fault gave way, the detonation of flash-vaporised carbon dioxide it produced was out of all proportion to the magnitude of the geological event. The hab walls ruptured immediately; all the breathable air was lost in less than a minute.

  Hank was in her pressure suit. Her first reaction, even before thinking of her mother and son, was to pull up her own hood and seal her suit shut before the toxic, freezing air could stab into her lungs. And, even as she saved herself, Hank made frantic plans about how to get to her family. She knew that Pierre was in a suit, open, without hood and gloves. And Jocelyn, meanwhile, was in no kind of suit at all.

  But it was Jocelyn, old as she was, who reacted most quickly. She dived for her grandson, ripped partition material from the torn wall, bundled Pierre up like a landed fish – all this in seconds – and ran flat-out from the shelter, exomuscles singing as she lugged her grandson to the safety of the rover.

  Jocelyn saved Hank’s life. In the process she sacrificed her own, as she probably knew.

  But it wasn’t the cold, the carbon dioxide air that would kill Jocelyn. It wasn’t Venus at all.

  THE LAST TIME Hank saw her mother alive, she was with Pierre, in the medical bay on Venera. Pierre was holding his grandmother’s hand.

  Jocelyn, stripped of her exoskeleton, head shaved, swathed in medical gear, looked utterly diminished. “Damn Pegasus bugs,” she said, her voice a scratch. “I’ll swear I could see them. Swarming out of that broken containment like a virus.”

  “No, you couldn’t, Grandmother,” Pierre said gently. “You kept them off me, though –”

  “But not off myself. Like a chemistry experiment, huh? There was enough carbon dioxide in my lungs to feed them at first. And then, you know, I looked it up, my body is, or was, sixty-five per cent oxygen, eighteen per cent carbon. I’m a damn lunch box for alien bugs from Beta Pegasi. I told you we should have nothing to do with them.”

  Pierre squeezed her hand. His own hand was gloved, to avoid infection.

  Hank said, “Mother –”

  “If you tell me I had a good long life I’ll spit in your eye.”

  “You would, too. Look – you achieved what you wanted to achieve. Whether we turn the carbon dioxide into Pegasus chalk or not, you made Venus a place we can use. The cloud life – we’ll find a new home for them, out there somewhere. And in the middle of it all you saved your grandson’s life.”

  “The shield-swallows.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The shield-swallows. We saw them from Venera. You thought they were pretty. The first thing I ever did that you actually liked. I never forgot that.”

  “Yes,” Hank said. “Yes, that’s right.” She barely remembered the shield-swallows, a scene centuries gone.

  “I did good, then,” Jocelyn whispered.

  “You’re a Poole. Of course you did good.”

  “They’ll put up a statue to you,” Pierre said. “Up on Maat Mons itself.”

  “Huh. Don’t you get it, kid? Your damn Pegasus bugs are turning me into a statue. Well, you got to start somewhere...”

  SION SENT A drunk text to Grant Hendryx at four in the morning, whipping off her hoodie and bra, snapping a pic and writing a sexy caption before hitting send. Except she aimed the camera the wrong way, and she picked the wrong entry in her address book, so Grant Donaldson, senior project manager at Aerodox Ventures, was surprised to receive a blurry photo of a pair of parking meters with a message that read, ‘LICK MY LEFT ONE.’

  The next day, Sion had an invitation to go to outer space.

  The sun blinged up the floor of Sion’s pink bedroom, like a kaleidoscope made of Cheetos and tequila bottle shards, and she growled and tried to build a pillow fort over her head. But nausea got the better of her and she had to stagger to the bathroom. That’s when she saw the text from a recruiter at Aerodox.

  She showed it to her friend D-Mei as they chugged mimosas over at D-Mei’s house, except they didn’t have any OJ or bubbly, so they were using orange creamsicle soda and Industrial Moonshine No. 5, imported from the Greater Appalachian Labor Zone, instead. Sion showed D-Mei the email. Modeling Opportunity, it said. First near-light-speed flight to another star system, it said. Open Bar, it said, perhaps most significantly.

  D-Mei read the email while the Pedicure Robot worked on her right foot, stopping and starting over and over whenever its operating system crashed and rebooted. Every time the robot jerked into motion again, D-Mei spilled some of her creamosa on the carpet. Her mom would be pissed.

  “Oh my god,” D-Mei’s eyes widened, sending glittery waves across her forehead and dimpled cheeks as her nanotech eyeshadow activated. She had blue hair and a face just like CantoPop idol Rayzy Wong. “We should so go. Rager in space, man. It says Raymond Burger will be on board. The founder of Aerodox. He probably parties like a madman.”

  “I dunno,” Sion said. “I get airsick. I probably get double space sick. I don’t want to be throwing up in space. And this is more like a hostessing gig than a modeling gig, and there’s a difference, you know.” Sion had bright red hair, with pink highlights, and a round face with big green eyes accentuated with neon purple eyeliner.

  “Don’t be a wuss.” D-Mei snorted. “It says you can bring a friend, as long as she’s hot. I made up that last part. But you gotta bring me. I want to meet Raymond Burger.”

  “I mean,” Sion said. “I am trying to clean up my act and stuff.” She took a long chug of the creamosa. “I mean, my dad says –”

  “Your dad,” said D-Mei, “is still butthurt about the Singularity.” The Pedicure Robot sputtered and she kicked it, so it fell on its side for a moment, then righted itself and started attacking D-Mei’s pinky toenail with a tiny scythe. Scraping, failing.

  “The Singularity,” Sion reached for the No. 5 bottle. “It was like fun while it lasted, right?”

  “Everything is fun while it lasts,” D-Mei said. “And nothing lasts forever. That’s why we gotta grab it while we got it. With both hands, dude.”

  “Okay, sure,” Sion put the bottle right to her face and inhaled the stench of sweat and despair from the millions of bonded peons working off their debts in the bowels of the mountains. They wished they all could be California gurls, she felt pretty sure. “Totally. I’ll say yes. Let’s go to space.”

  SION ROLLED UP to the Aerodox hangar in her Princess Superstar car, which was bright pink and convertible, with furry disco balls hanging from the rearview, and she piled out of the car in her silver platforms and silver fake fur jumpsuit, with hood. She had big sunglasses and lipgloss that showed an animated GIF of pink bunnies on her lips.

  D-Mei was already there in the tiny departure lounge overlooking the main hangar, and she had a fistful of tiny bottles from the minibar, with real brand names like Vermouth and Scotch, none of that nasty generic stuff. “They have Cognac,” she squeed. “I heard that Cognac is the best kind!” She showed Sion where to get her own toy-size bottles, but Sion shook her head and showed D-Mei the black “X” she’d Sharpied on her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” Sion said. “I promised my dad that I would stay straight-edge on this trip. We’re going to be some of the first people to leave the solar system, and history is watching us, and all that shiz. Plus I don’t want to be the one who throws up on the first alien life we meet. What if they decide that’s how humans communicate? So I’m sticking to like space coffee or something.”

  “Ohhh kay,” D-Mei said, in that tone that suggested she would give Sion a day, tops, before she changed her mind. “In any case, we got some important decisions to make here.” She pointed a long acrylic nail at the flight crew, who were doing final system checks on the outside of the space shuttle Ascension, which was already pointing its angular nosecone upwards as if it couldn’t wait to get out the
re and fuck some shit up in space. The shuttle was surrounded by no fewer than four booster rockets, to get it up into orbit, where it would dock with the massive starship Advance, which had taken years and billions of dollars to construct, and was parked over the Equator.

  There were a number of boys who showed potential, including this one engineer named Daryl with tousled brown-blond hair and bulky shoulders inside his white starched uniform. And Choppy, the bald navigator who had kind of a thick neck but kind eyes. And Grant Donaldson, who kept giving them funny looks when he thought they weren’t looking.

  “Hey,” Sion said. “I was wondering about something. So nothing computerized works any more. At all. Right? So how did these people manage to get a spaceship that can fly to another star system to work? That would be the most computer-intensive shizz you could imagine.”

  Sion thought D-Mei was going to laugh at her, but instead her friend just nodded and gave her kind of a serious look. “That’s a really good question, slutbabe. That’s why I’m really glad you’re like the designated driver in the passenger section. You think about stuff like that.”

  “But also,” Sion said. “I thought that if we got close to the speed of light, our mass would expand exponentially, and it would take an unfunky amount of energy to move us forward. And even then it ought to take us years to reach another star system. But we’re only supposed to be gone a few weeks, right?”

  “You are asking such good questions,” D-Mei said.

  And then the cute navigator, Choppy, came over and smiled at her. Up close his eyes had gray flecks, and his nose was broken in an adorable way. “Hey, I couldn’t help overhearing,” he said. “Actually, both of those questions have sort of the same answer. We have the most advanced A.I. in existence, which has next-gen firewalls that outsmart even the most super-sentient viruses. But also, our A.I. calculated the equations that allow us to use the thing you’re talking about, the mass thing, to our advantage. It’s like judo: The more our mass increases, the more power we get.”

  That all sounded too good to be true, but then Sion got stuck on the first thing Choppy had mentioned: “You have an A.I. that actually works? It doesn’t break down all the time?”

  “We sure do,” Choppy said. “Her name is Roxx. Do you want to meet her?”

  “Uh, sure.” Sion couldn’t help imagining how her dad would act when he heard she met a real working A.I. – he had spent his whole life as a software engineer, before everything melted down.

  “Because I think she would like to meet you. So it’s a date, then.” Choppy held out one hand, which had cartoon skulls tattooed on the knuckles, and after just a second’s hesitation, she took it with three fingers and the tip of her thumb. D-Mei gave her a huge wink, as if ‘do you want to meet the ship’s A.I.’ could only be code for one thing.

  SOMETIMES SION FELT like her dad thought that if she just cleaned up her act and stopped partying, the Singularity would come back and everything would be awesome again. Like it was her fault, personally, that all the computers had crashed, right after they had just become supersmart.

  The Singularity happened when Sion was five, and her memories of it were mixed up with other things that happened around that time. Like when she was taken to see Santa’s village at the mall, which must have been before the Singularity because everything at the mall worked properly but wasn’t thinking for itself or anything. The Singularity belonged to a time when her father was nine feet tall and carried her on his big shoulders, and the world was kind of magical – even before all of the kitchen appliances came to life and started speaking to Sion by name, like in a Disney toon. The Singularity, to Sion, was innocence.

  When it failed, when the viruses gained superintelligence or whatever, Sion’s pet dog died. Smudge wasn’t a robot dog, or even cybernetic, like a lot of her friends’ pets back then – just a regular shaggy mutt with a big drooly tongue. But a self-driving car lost control at the wrong moment, when Smudge was out in the front yard, and plowed up the grass and turf, before crushing the dog into a furry splat.

  That was the moment the entire world fell apart, the economy ended, and tons of people died. But to Sion’s child mind, the whole thing was subsumed into the death of Smudge, for whom she had an elaborate funeral with her older siblings and a stereobox blasting funeral music, interrupted by horrible fart noises as the stereobox’s software kept glitching out.

  After Smudge died, the future grew a lot smaller. There wasn’t anybody that Sion could really count on, because everyone flaked all the time. People showed up an hour late, if they showed up at all. Sion’s teachers would just start weeping in the middle of class, and her siblings both dropped out of college because they could never pay off the student loans. Sion’s mom flaked permanently, just disappeared one day and never came back.

  If Sion hadn’t met D-Mei, she probably would have lost her mind.

  Sion was holding a rice pudding, she was eight or nine, and she was standing in front of the school waiting for a ride home that she was starting to think would never arrive. She was still in denial about her mom being gone for good, so part of her was hoping her mom would suddenly roll up in the minivan her parents had sold five years earlier and bundle her into a child seat she was too big for. She was scared to try the rice pudding, because the last time she’d eaten rice pudding from that machine it had tasted like rotten eggs. Software. She was just holding this plastic cup of rice pudding in one hand, with a spoon embedded in it, trying to decide if it was really edible this time.

  “Throw it,” a voice said in her ear.

  “What?” Sion jumped out of one of her shoes.

  “Go ahead and throw it. They deserve it, the creeps.”

  Sion hadn’t thought of the rice pudding as a projectile – but of course that was the best use of it, duh. And she had been absent-mindedly staring at a group of Perrinite kids celebrating over by the swingset in their terrible dungarees. Celebrating, because the Right Reverend Daniel Perrin had predicted that the amount of sin and wickedness on the internet would eventually cause the very computers to be smited by the wrath of God, and now it had happened. The Perrinites were the only ones happy lately, and they were being real dicks about it.

  “Throw it, come on,” D-Mei said, the first words she had ever said to Sion. “I dare you.”

  Sion threw. They wound up going to the principal’s office, and their parents were called, which meant Sion actually got a ride home.

  A few months later, Sion and D-Mei sabotaged the confetti cannon at the big pep rally, and everybody blamed it on viruses. (Even though the confetti cannon had no computer components.) They played spin-the-bottle with older kids, huffed paintball paint, put nanotech glitter on their eyelids at recess, graffitied the girls’ room, and snuck gin from their History teacher Mrs. Hathaway’s thermos. They were the first kids to wear makeup at school, and when they went on to a school that had uniforms, they were first to take a boxcutter to the hemlines.

  Every time Sion started to feel like this world, that was supposed to know who she was and what she needed, was downgrading her instead... every time Sion felt lonesome and terrible... D-Mei was there with another really bad idea that would get them in a lot of trouble.

  Sion’s dad asked her once, “If D-Mei asked you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”

  Sion just rolled her eyes. “You were the one who taught me hypothetical questions are a waste of time, Dad. D-Mei’s never asked me to jump off a bridge. She only asks me to do things that are fun and awesome. Quit with the counterfactuals.” Her dad was always startled when she talked smartypants, and it was the best way to shut him up. Plus she actually had thought a lot about the ‘jump off a bridge’ scenario, truth be told, and this was what she’d decided in the end.

  BREAKING FREE OF Earth’s gravity made Sion feel sicker than the worst hangover, and it took forever. Like that time when she was at the Sex Lab and the glitter spray had turned superdense due to a nanotech fail – except times one bill
ion. She thought she was going to die, and she reached out for D-Mei’s hand across the aisle, except that D-Mei was putting a nozzle inside one nostril and closing the other, just as the pressure hit blackout levels and Sion thought she would never see again. Sion let out a tiny cry of pain and topsy-turvy nausea, and then she felt D-Mei’s fingers and chunky rings against her own. Then they swung, like a crazy roller-coaster, and Sion finally blew floating chunks into the compostable barf bag, right before the curve of the Earth came into view, a blue neon stripe separating two kinds of darkness.

  And then they caught sight of the Advance, a great floating walnut made out of steel and radiation-resistant fiberglass cladding. Forced perspective made the Advance look almost as big as the Earth, but it really was humongous: a mile wide and a mile and a half long, although the habitable areas were much smaller because all that bulk protected everyone from cosmic radiation. As they grew closer, the walnut shape revealed a million tiny openings, plus an array of bulky attachments on the front that would fire lasers off into space and enable the ship to reach unthinkable velocities.

  As they approached, Sion came to see this massive starship as the embodiment of her higher self. Ugly, perfect, a boast shouted into the void. She vowed to live up to it, somehow.

  THAT ‘X’ ON Sion’s hand was the key to a whole new version of herself – a Sion who was incredibly awkward and unable to navigate any social situations at all. She started to realize after an hour or two on board the Advance that maybe setting off on board a massive interstellar ship, full of weird situations, wobbly gravity and Space Bros might not have been the best moment to try and reinvent herself completely. But she kept going, as she and D-Mei got whisked through a series of staterooms and lounges, with themes like Jungle Safari and Garden of Delights. “You’re already in space, why would you want to fantasize about being in a jungle?” Sion wondered aloud – much too loud, causing several people to give her the stink-eye. But then there were actual wonders, like a Secondary Control Center where Raymond Burger himself was holding court flanked by swimsuit models, which included a 3-D holographic representation of the ship’s journey out of the solar system. (“No pause ’til the motherfucking heliopause” was the official party chant of the Advance.) Sion ran her fingers through the space between Jupiter and its moons, but then men in pinstriped onesies kept coming up to her and asking her if she liked stuff that everybody likes, like dancing, or music, or puppies. She just wasn’t drunk enough for this. Raymond Burger looked like a debt-auction host: gleaming smile, white sideburns, fashionable rooster pompadour. And then they ran into Choppy, the navigator, and he took them past the fancy lounge areas, into the inner workings of the ship.