Orphans of Earth by Sean Williams, Shane Dix Read Free Book Online

of the colony were their machines. Even the numerous artificial bodies with which they had populated the habitats had died, one by one, as the minds behind them had ceased giving them orders to eat and repair themselves.
    Engram breakdown wasn’t pretty to watch, and Hatzis had avoided studying the colony’s records too closely. She had made sure Alander had seen them, though. Engrams might have been adequate copies of the mind of a human being for short missions, but they simply weren’t adaptable enough to survive more than a few decades. They couldn’t cope with the changes that inevitably came as a by-product of life. As small errors or random mutations built up in the code that generated them, higher definitions resisted the subtle new pathways each mind wanted to follow. Instead of adapting, the engrams clung to the way they had been, to the selves they had left behind on Earth years ago. Psychosis was inevitable. If they weren’t shut down from the outside, they entered a state Hatzis had heard described as brainlock and ceased to function. When they reached that point, there was no repairing them. It was, she supposed, a sort of natural death for this particular sort of artificial mind—so the term senescence seemed particularly apt. Whether it was possible to reverse the aging process, she wasn’t sure. Alander’s continued existence suggested that maybe the randomizing was doing him good, but the experiments she was conducting with various copies of herself had yet to yield any clear-cut results.
    All she needed was time, though. Only thirteen days had passed in the real universe since the destruction of Adrasteia, but for her, thinking faster, that was the equivalent of several months. She had shown her engrams ways to cheat the processing budget on the survey missions, so they were working faster, too. Combined, her extended self was working inefficiently but exhaustively on various projects designed to ensure humanity’s long-term survival. All she had to do was live through the coming weeks by avoiding the Starfish as much as possible, and then everything would work out. She would solve the senescence problem, she was sure; then, using Spinner technology, she would unite all of her various parts and commence working on what she would ultimately become. Whatever that was...
    Alander’s eyes tracked across the dust-filled basin of the dead sea. Upraised rib cages of long-dead sea beasts, Hatzis mused, seeing what Alander saw, would have been much more evocative of the life that had died here than the occasional footprint preserved in the salt crust near the habitat’s egress airlocks. The structure was large enough to hold a community of several dozen people and boasted two shuttle landing pads and the base of what might have been, given time, an orbital tower.
    Sothis wasn’t a Spinner contactee; by the time the aliens had appeared, the very last of the colonists—Faith Jong—had been dead for almost thirty years. Hatzis remembered Jong as a petite software specialist interested in bonsai and late twentieth-century popular music. It was hard to picture her as the crazed engram that had loaded herself into the operating system of a small fusion reactor and sent the contained nova within critical in order to drive out the darkness creeping over her mind.
    Faith Jong’s memorial was a crater two kilometers wide on the far side of the planet. Thankfully, the explosion hadn’t harmed the main installation, which now served as the counterintelligence base for the remains of humanity. It combined Spinner and human technology, the latter a mix of 2050 and 2150, depending on what resources were available at any given time. It orbited a star that wasn’t typical for human habitation and sat slightly ahead and to one side of the projected Spinner advance. It had a population of two, but if circumstances had their way, that figure would rise considerably.
    “I know you’re watching me,” said