Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection

by James S.A. Corey

“And coherence is measured in beer,”

“Engine engineer,” she said. “Seems like it ought to be redundant.” “I always thought thrust specialist sounded dirty,” he said.

On Mars, the joke went, a man’s hole was his castle where values of castle approached dorm room.

“That’s what peace is, right? Postponing the conflict until the thing you were fighting over doesn’t matter.”

It’s true of anybody who didn’t grow up in the Belt. The problem with you is that you are wasteful.”

“I’ve got three more sisters,” Dawes said. “Someone’s got to check their seals.”

If you bring forth that which is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

“They’re afraid of us.” “Then why do they act like they hate us?” David’s father said with something like triumph. “Because that’s what fear looks like when it needs someplace to go.”

She understood on a deep, animal level that sex was like music or language. It could express anything. Love, yes. Or anger, or bitterness, or despair. It could be a way to grieve or a way to take revenge. It could be a weapon or a nightmare or a solace. Sex was meaningless, and so it could mean anything.

For most of us there was a sense that this shabby, empty room was the final destination for us, the former science team from Thoth Station. Some wept at the thought. The research group did not.

There was always an electricity in the unknown, a sense of impending revelation like the last moments before orgasm.

“And so they’ve thrown us the apple, eh?” “The fruit of knowledge,” I said, but I had misunderstood which apple he meant. “Worse than that, the golden one,” he said. “Private property. Status. Now it’s all going to be about fighting over who’s the prettiest one, and war will come out of it.” “Don’t be grandiose.” “It isn’t me, it’s history. Differences in status and wealth are always what drives war.”

She woke up, marched to the training center, and applied for any program that would earn her enough money to legally go off contraception. It took her three years of fourteen-hour days, but she managed it. Enough money for both a licensed child and the donation of germ plasm that would help begin my life. She said that it was her choice to purchase sperm from a trading house that gave me my intelligence and drive, that the only fertile men in the housing complex were criminals and thugs too far outside of civilization to be on the basic rolls, and that I couldn’t have gotten it from her because she was lazy and stupid.

I have heard it said that how you spend your day is how you spend your life, and my days changed then. The football games, the late night parties, the flirtation with the other young men in my circle: all of it ended. I divided myself into three different young men: one a nurse to his failing mother, one a fierce student on a quest to understand the disease that was defining his life, and the last a victim of depression so profound it made bathing or eating food a challenge.

The night she died, I sat at her feet, my head resting on the red wool blanket that covered her wasted lap. Heartbreak and relief were my soul’s twin bodyguards. She moved beyond pain or distress, and I told myself the worst was over.

Worse, it seemed like the kind of asserted reality—the willful decision to believe that people would act the way you preferred that they would—that posed a constant threat to those of us in research.

If church had felt half as good as this, I would have been a religious man.

The basic structures were there: the peculiar way the individual molecular engines unfolded; the instantaneous networking that suggested entanglement communication; the beautifully complicated tertiary beta sheeting studded with proteins dense with information and vulnerable to oxidation.

There is nothing so destructive and also so easy to overlook as a bad idea.

“What the others can’t, or won’t, or don’t feel like they need to do is just necessary for us.”

Remembering what I felt then and feeling it again now are very different things, and one is easier than the other.

The changes that we went through to become what we became didn’t blind us to humanity.

My worth had been determined from without, by how I imagined that I appeared to others. That is what being a social animal is, after all. Emotional and definitional interdependence.

What I thought of as the Queen Bee. While a great many of the structures I was looking at were beyond my understanding—beyond, I thought, any human understanding—there were others that did make some sense. Lattices that mimicked the beta sheets and expanded on them. Complex control and pattern-matching systems that were still just recognizable as brain tissues, two-stage pumps adapted from hearts. And at the center, a particle that nothing led to. A particle that both required and provided a massive amount of energy.

When I realized that the physical dimensions of the structure-particle were macroscopic, the knowledge rushed through me like a flood. I was seeing a stabilizing network that could bring subquantum effects up to a classical scale. A signaling device that ignored the speed of light by shrugging off locality, or possibly a stable wormhole.

“The idea that animal suffering is less important than human suffering is a religious one. It assumes a special creation, and that we—you and I—are different in kind than other animals. We are morally separate from rats or horses or chimps, not based on any particular physical difference between us, but just because we claim that we’re sacred by our nature and have dominion over them. It’s a story we tell that lets us do what we do. Consider the question without that filter, and it looks very different.

“You said there’s an ethical obligation to avoid unnecessary suffering. I agree. That’s why getting good data is our primary responsibility. Good experimental design, deep datasets, parallel studies whenever they don’t interfere. Bad data is just another way of saying needless suffering. And torturing rats to see how humans would respond? It’s terrible data because rats aren’t humans any more than pigeons are horses.”

“The preliminary we’re doing here is magnetic. It suppresses some very specific, targeted areas of your brain. Reduces fixity. Some of our staff finds that it helps them see things they wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but it is the mother of any number of other things as well: sacrifice and monstrosity and metamorphosis. Necessity is the mother of all necessary things, to coin a tautology.

The alien weapon. Tucked within the planetesimal’s icy layers, the joint research group—Protogen and the Martian Naval Scientific Service—had found tiny reactive particles the size, roughly, of a midrange virus, but with a design structure and informational depth unlike anything Earth’s biosphere had ever imagined. The protomolecule, we called it, branding it immediately in a territorial move that irritated the Martian scientists. We ignored their protests as irrelevant.

Our best guess was that it had been sent from some distance we couldn’t guess at a time when a defined cell membrane stood as the heights of terrestrial life. The protomolecule appeared to be a message in a bottle, but one that included its own grammar books and instruction tutorials, ready to teach whatever aboriginal cells it found how to become the things it required. We argued whether something as inert as a spore might be intelligent, at least implicitly, but without coming to a conclusion. The first evidence of a tree of life apart from our own enchanted and confounded us. Me.

Watching the initial infection stages work on humans set the course for everything that would come later, but we couldn’t afford to let the transformation fully run its course in a location we didn’t control. So once we had our early-stage data, we gassed them and then burned the bodies.

our analyses strongly suggested that the protomolecule went through behavioral phase changes with increased mass as profound as a switch between states of matter.

“It’s not an egg,” I hissed. “It’s the support frame for a stable nonlocality. Something to pass information. Maybe even mass. It only looks biological because it co-opted biological material.”

“Do an implicit structure analysis,” I said. “Look at the membranes as pathways, not walls. See how the resonances reinforce. The protomolecule opened something. It’s not an alien, it’s a way for the aliens to talk to us. Or to get here. Don’t trust me. Look at the data.”

Hope survives even stretched to a single molecule’s thickness.

“Not for Quintana. Not for the man, anyway. It’s the idea of him. We were thirty-five people. Now we’re thirty-four. Sure, the one we lost was an asshole. That’s not the point. It was the same for Kanter. Every time one of us dies, it will be the same. We are all less in ourselves because we’re less together. They aren’t mourning him. They’re mourning themselves and all the lives they could have had if we weren’t stuck in here. Quintana’s just a reminder of that.”

when Kibushi used the information without citing her, she snuck into the showers at the gymnasium and beat him to death with a ceramic workbench cap.

Singh, while formally reprimanded by Dresden, kept her status on her team. It only tended to confirm what we all already knew: Morality as we had known it no longer applied to us. We had become too important for consequences.

of our sister research stations on Io and Osiris Station

Wonder if these stations become relevant later on.

Even the greatest war in human history would have been paltry compared with our work. To bend the protomolecule to our own will, to direct the flow of information now as whatever alien brilliance had done before, opened the concept of humanity beyond anything that even we were capable of imagining. If we managed what we hoped, the sacrifice of Eros Station would unlock literally anything we could imagine.

For those first beautiful hours, I traced the changes on a physical map of Eros Station. The protomolecule activity began at the shelters that we’d converted to incubators, feeding the smart particles with the radiation that seemed to best drive activity. It spread along the transit tunnels, out to the casino levels, the maintenance tunnels, the docks. It eddied through the caves of Eros like a vast breath, the greatest act of transformation in the history of the human race and the tree of life from which it sprang, and I—along with a handful of others—watched it unfold in an awe that approached religious ecstasy.

want to say that I honored the sacrificed population, that I took a moment in my heart to thank them for the contribution they were all unwittingly making for the future that they left behind. The sort of thing you’re trained to say about any lab animals advanced enough to be cute. And maybe I did, but my fascination with the protomolecule and its magic—that isn’t too strong a word—overwhelmed any sentimentality I had about our methods.

Too many simplifying assumptions, too little imagination on our part, and the utter alienness of the protomolecule conspired to overthrow all our best intentions. The behavior of the particles had changed not only in scale but in kind and continued to do so again at increasingly narrow intervals. The sense of watching a countdown grew into a certainty, though to what, I couldn’t say.

I felt the loss of the experiment like mourning a death, only worse. Because out there, like hell being the absence of God, the experiment was still going on but it had left me behind.

She was halfway through her tenth year, but this was only her third summer. Her mother had explained to her that Laconia moved around its star more slowly than Earth did, and then talked about axial tilt in a way that Cara pretended to understand so they could talk about something else.

“These aren’t birds, babygirl. We call them that because they’re sort of like birds. But real birds have feathers. And beaks—” “No bird I’ve ever seen.” Her mother took a deep breath and smiled through her exhalation. “When life comes up on a planet, evolution forces a bunch of choices. What kinds of proteins it’s going to use. How it’s going to pass information on from one generation to the next. Life on Earth made those decisions a long time ago, and so everything that comes from Earth has some things in common. The kinds of proteins we use. The ways we get chemical energy out of our foods. The ways our genes work. But other planets made other choices. That’s why we can’t eat the plants that grow on Laconia. We have to grow them special so they’ll be part of our tree of life.”

Admiral Duarte sent his condolences. This was a lapse of discipline that should never have happened. The admiral had already ordered the drunk soldier’s execution. Cara’s family would be put first on the list for a place in the new housing facilities, and Cara would be guaranteed a place in the academy when it opened. The admiral understood that nothing could compensate for their loss, but the soldiers would do what they could. With the family’s permission, the admiral would like to attend the wake. Someone had said, Of course, but Cara didn’t know if it had been her mother or her father. She might even have said it herself.

“My name is Winston.” “I know,” she said like she was accepting an apology. Letting him off the hook. He shifted to look at Xan. They were silent for a few seconds. He sighed. “I wish I could make this better. I’ve lost people I love before. It was very hard.” “Why?” she asked, and her voice was sharper than she’d expected. It wasn’t a fair thing to ask. She wasn’t even sure quite what she meant by it other than who the hell was he to come to her brother’s funeral and talk about his own pain. Winston took the question in, pursing his lips like he was sucking on it. Tasting it. “Because I hate feeling powerless,” he said. “I hate being reminded that the universe is so much bigger than I am. And that I can’t always protect people.” He shifted to look at her directly again. Like he actually cared about her reaction to this explanation. She understood why the soldiers would follow him. Why they all loved him.

And yes, if I could save your brother, I would. For him, and for your parents, and for you. If I could wave a magic wand and go back in time to keep him off that road? I would do it.” “You killed the soldier who killed him. Didn’t you need him too?” “Not as much as I needed you and your family to know that your brother mattered to me. I’m the government here. I imposed that. I didn’t ask your permission first. That puts some obligations on me. It means I have to show sincerity and respect for our rules, even when that requires doing something I might not want to do. I don’t have the right to compromise.”