Godlike Machines by Jonathan Strahan [Editor] Read Free Book Online Page B

slimy, womanising prick who’d made a pass at me at a conference in Trieste, and wasn’t going to let me forget that I’d told him where to get off.”
    I smile. “You must have been fierce in your day.”
    “Well, maybe it wasn’t him—but we still needed a different referee. Gennadi, meanwhile, thought we should sit back and do what the referee was telling us. Which meant running our models again, which meant a week of time on the department supercomputer. Normally, that would have meant going right back to the start of the queue. But there was a gap in the schedule—another group had just pulled out of their slot, because they couldn’t get their software to compile properly. We could have their slot-but only if we got our model up and running that evening, with all the modifications the referee wanted us to make.”
    “You weren’t going to make it to that band.”
    “That was when the IAU telegram came in to my inbox. I didn’t even open it at first; it wasn’t as if IAU telegrams were exactly unusual. It probably just meant that a supernova had gone off in a remote galaxy, or that some binary star was undergoing a nova. Nothing I needed to get excited about.”
    “But that wasn’t what it was about.”
    “It was the Matryoshka, of course—the emergence event, when it came into our solar system. A sudden influx of cosmic rays, triggering half the monitoring telescopes and satellites in existence. They all turned to look at the point where the machine had come in. A flash of energy that intense, it could only be a gamma-ray burst, happening in some distant galaxy. That’s what everyone thought it was at first, especially as the Matryoshka came in high above the ecliptic, and well out of the plane of the galaxy. It looked extragalactic, not some local event. Sooner or later, though, they crunched the numbers-triangulated from the slightly different pointing angles of the various spacecraft and telescopes, the slightly different detection times of the event—and they realized that, whatever this was, it had happened within one light hour of the Sun. Not so much on our doorstep, cosmically speaking, as in our house, making itself at home.” Nesha smiles at the memory. “There was some wild theorizing to begin with. Everything from a piece of antimatter colliding with a comet, a quantum black hole evaporating, to the illegal test of a Chinese super-weapon in deep space. Of course, it was none of those things. It was spacetime opening wide enough to vomit out a machine the size of Tasmania.”
    “It was a while before they found the Matryoshka itself.”
    Nesha nods. “You try finding something that dark, when you don’t even know in which direction it’s moving.”
    “Even from the Tereshkova, it was hard to believe it was actually out there.”
    “To begin with, we still didn’t know what to make of it. The layered structure confused the hell out of us. We weren’t used to analyzing anything like that. It was artificial, clearly, but it wasn’t made of solid parts. It was like a machine caught in the instant of blowing up, but which was still working, still doing whatever it was sent to do. Without getting closer, we could only resolve the structure in the outer layer. We didn’t start calling it Shell 1 until we knew there were deeper strata. The name Matryoshka didn’t come until after the first fly-by probes, when we glimpsed Shell 2. The Americans called it the Easter Egg for a little while, but eventually everyone started using the Russian name.”
    I know that when she talks about “we”, she means the astronomical community as a whole, rather than her own efforts. Nesha’s involvement—the involvement that had first made her famous, then ruined her reputation, then her life-did not come until later.
    The emergence event—the first apparition—caught humanity entirely unaware. The Matryoshka had come out of its wormhole mouth—if that was what it was—on an elliptical,