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

was something different about us. It affected us all, even Yakov, who hadn’t gone inside. Just being close to it was enough.”
    “Different in what way?” Nesha asks.
    “It began in small ways, while we were still on the Tereshkova. Weird slips. Mistakes that didn’t make sense. As if our identities, our personalities and memories, were blurring. On the way home, I sat at the computer keyboard and found myself typing Yakov’s name and password into the system, as if he’s sitting inside me. A few days later Galenka wakes up and tells me she dreamed she was in Klushino, a place she’s never visited. It was as if something in the machine had touched us and removed some fundamental barrier in our heads, some wall or moat that keeps one person from becoming another. When the silver fluid got into us ...”
    “I don’t understand. How could the doctors get too close to you? What happened to them?”
    I sense her uneasiness; the realization that she may well be sharing her room with a lunatic. I have never pretended to be entirely sane, but it must only be now that the white bones of true madness are beginning to show through my skin.
    “I didn’t mean to alarm you, Nesha. I’ll be gone shortly, I promise you. Why don’t you tell me what it was like for you, back when it all began?”
    “You know my story.”
    “I’d still like to hear it from you. From the day it arrived. How it changed you.”
    “You were old enough to remember it. You already told me that.”
    “But I wasn’t an astronomer, Nesha. I was just a 20 year old kid with some ideas about being a cosmonaut. You were how old, exactly?”
    “Forty years. I’d been a professional astronomer for 15 or 16 of them, by then.” She becomes reflective, as if it’s only now that she has given that time of her life any thought. “I’d been lucky, really. I’d made professor, which meant I didn’t have to grub around for funding every two years. I had to do my share of lecturing, and fighting for my corner of the department, but I still had plenty of time for independent research. I was still in love with science, too. My little research area-stellar pulsation modes-it wasn’t the most glamorous. They didn’t fight to put our faces on the covers of magazine, or give us lucrative publishing deals to talk about how we were uncovering the mysteries of the universe, touching the face of god. But we knew it was solid science, important to the field as a whole.” She leans forward to make a point. “Astronomy’s like a cathedral, Dimitri. The ones putting the gold on the top spire get all the glory, but they’d be nothing without a solid foundation. That’s where we were—down in the basement, down in the crypt, making sure it was all anchored to firm ground. Fundamental stellar physics. Not very exotic compared to mapping the large scale universe, or probing the event horizons of black holes. But vital all the same.”
    “I don’t doubt it.”
    “I can remember that afternoon when the news came in. Gennadi and I were in my office. It was a bright day, with the blinds drawn. It was the end of the week and we were looking forward to a few days off. We had tickets to see a band in town that night. We just had one thing we wanted to get sorted before we finished. A paper we’d been working on had come back from the referee with a load of snotty comments, and we didn’t quite agree on how to deal with them. I wanted to write back to the journal and request a different referee. The referee on our paper was anonymous, but I was sure I knew who it was—a 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