IQE

by Torn MacAlester

1

It was a strange sit­u­a­tion. I need­ed to be in three places at once. Of course, I was stuck on the Endeav­or eigh­teen years on its way on a forty-year jour­ney to Prox­i­ma. I also need­ed to be on the ship arriv­ing at Prox­i­ma that very month. And, if all wasn’t hard enough, I need­ed to attend the direc­tors’ meet­ings on Earth. Instant com­mu­ni­ca­tions made that pos­si­ble, the instant com­mu­ni­ca­tions of quan­tum entan­gle­ment, or IQE.

The IQE allowed me to inhab­it a robot at the oth­er end of the com­mu­ni­ca­tions con­nec­tions. I saw through its eyes. I could inter­act with objects with its arms. For my Earth-side, the robot was near­ly human in appear­ance, tak­ing on my approx­i­mate shape and size and hav­ing a resem­blance to my face, a com­mon vari­a­tion that was avail­able when I left for Prox­i­ma. New­er mod­els that were indis­tin­guish­able were avail­able, but I didn’t want to upgrade. I got used to the mod­el and I could use it with­out effort.

Also, IQE con­nect­ed me with the robot on board Colos­sus at Prox­i­ma. It was much more sophis­ti­cat­ed in some ways, but it didn’t look at all like me or any oth­er human being, for that mat­ter. It was a con­struc­tion robot, intend­ing to use the raw mate­ri­als on Prox­i­ma to build us a city for when we arrived. Me and thir­ty thou­sand oth­er robots were build­ing a city for the first five thou­sand peo­ple to arrive at Prox­i­ma. The first set­tle­ment on anoth­er world. Those robots were arriv­ing today.

“Let’s get start­ed,” said Rita, the Man­ag­ing Direc­tor and head of the Prox­i­ma devel­op­ment group. “Let’s put aside old busi­ness and address the new busi­ness. Direc­tor Wu indi­cat­ed last week he had some­thing new to discuss.”

“Shouldn’t we defer the new busi­ness until we’ve tak­en care of old busi­ness?” I asked. “The robots are land­ing on Prox­i­ma, after all.”

“That is exact­ly why I want­ed to dis­cuss the new busi­ness,” said Wu.

“Give us a minute to find out what the new busi­ness is before you raise the objec­tion,” said Rita. “I real­ize the time is crit­i­cal, but we have to know.”

I glanced at the dis­play. The lan­der was in ter­mi­nal flight, look­ing for the touch­down loca­tion. It would arrive upon Proxima’s sur­face in minutes.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“As Thomas is well aware,” said Wu. “We have been mon­i­tor­ing Prox­i­ma from Colos­sus.”

“Yes,” agreed, watch­ing the read­out as I looked into Direc­tor Wu’s robot eyes. Like myself, he was else­where and rep­re­sent­ed by a robot in the proceedings.

“What you don’t know is that we have a poten­tial life detec­tion in the twi­light area, the ring of the plan­et that is in per­pet­u­al twi­light,” said Wu. “Because it’s tidal­ly locked, an area approx­i­mate­ly equiv­a­lent to Earth­’s trop­ics would be hab­it­able under these conditions.”

Life!

            The direc­tors looked at each oth­er. It shocked both human and robot faces. This dis­cov­ery upend­ed the entire mission.

“I’m going to say out loud what every­body is think­ing,” said the Man­ag­ing Direc­tor. “We must rewrite the entire mis­sion from scratch. Our entire mis­sion plan was based on not find­ing life on Proxima.”

“That is cor­rect,” said Senior Direc­tor Tia. Her fea­tures betrayed the dis­tress her human host must have been feel­ing. “We had expect­ed a life­less world. And all the data seemed to indi­cate the same thing. What changed?”

“The clos­er data that we have been col­lect­ing with Colos­sus as soon as it entered the sys­tem,” explained Wu. “Three years ago, as we entered the sys­tem and slow­ly began maneu­ver­ing to achieve orbit even­tu­al­ly, all our instru­ments point­ed at Prox­i­ma b, the world we’ve called Prox­i­ma. Since that time, we gath­ered some infor­ma­tion about some vari­a­tions asso­ci­at­ed with the eccen­tric­i­ty of Proxima’s orbit around the star.”

“Sea­son­al changes are what you are talk­ing about,” I said.

“Yes Thomas,” said Wu. “That is exact­ly what I am talk­ing about. Once we got close enough to see the half meter scale tex­ture of the sur­face, we weren’t sure. But there are cir­cu­lar shaped struc­tures that change size over the year. They are grow­ing and reced­ing inverse­ly with distance.”

“Clos­er to the star, the big­ger?” I asked.

“That is what I said,” Wu said, while his robot winked.

“Chem­istry,” I said.

“Obvi­ous­ly,” said Wu. “The ques­tion is whether it is biochemistry.”

“Well,” I said. “If it were life, then there would be no question.”

“Pre­cise­ly,” said Wu. “I think we should be sure before we go along with the pre­vi­ous mis­sion plan.”

“Rita,” I said. “If Wu is wrong. It could cost us pre­cious time that we don’t have. Endeav­or doesn’t have many resources left after its arrival. We’ll need to debark as soon as we get there.”

“That’s twen­ty-two years out,” said Rita.

“But we planned it with tight tol­er­ances. Once IQE was avail­able, the Colos­sus made the entire mis­sion pos­si­ble,” I said. “Get the robots to Prox­i­ma while Endeav­or was still in tran­sit. Get the set­tle­ment built before the pas­sen­gers arrive.”

“And that is what you are doing,” said Senior Direc­tor Tia. “I believe Wu mere­ly wants to coop part of those robots to exam­ine the structures.

“This will put us behind sched­ule,” I said. “I don’t think the mar­gins will allow us much time.”

“We built the Endeav­or with at least an 8 per­cent mar­gin,” said Wu, his robot becom­ing a bit more ani­mat­ed in the con­fer­ence room.

“That’s assum­ing we didn’t have any degra­da­tion of the Endeavor’s sys­tems beyond the mod­els,” I said. “The mod­els made a lot of assump­tions about the inter­stel­lar envi­ron­ment that we sim­ply didn’t have the data to match.”

“But you are all vol­un­teers because of these facts,” said Wu. “No one draft­ed you, Thomas. And no one else on Endeav­or was.”

“That’s the point I’m try­ing to make, Wu,” I said force­ful­ly, rais­ing the vocals on the robot to raise its voice. “We were vol­un­teers based upon a par­tic­u­lar set of assump­tions. You’re try­ing to change them and say we’re expend­able because of them.”

“You’re expend­able because we found life on your des­ti­na­tion,” said Wu. “You take sec­ond place to that based upon all our protocols.”

With that, I forced the robot to its feet and lunged across the table at Wu’s robot. I grabbed it by the ears and start­ed pound­ing its head on the table. Wu must have had a free hand. I felt it smash on the side of my robot’s skull. I could see that its head had bounced around the room, com­ing to a rest at a loca­tion where I could bare­ly see the ensu­ing strug­gle. As I fought to main­tain con­trol, I could see that Wu’s robot had grabbed a hand full of wires out of my robot­’s neck and jerked them, result­ing in my image just blank­ing. I real­ized in an instant, all the hun­dreds of megabits per sec­ond data that allowed me to be in instant con­tact with mis­sion con­trol had been sev­ered. The robot was dead because the IQE was dead on the con­nec­tion to Earth.